Comment 27 for bug 362875

More notes:

Regarding my previous comment (1) above: the various reported messages are different. You can check the Linux kernel source for the meaning of "error -71" for instance. The ones mentioned so far by various observers on this thread are:

error -71: -EPROTO (Protocol error)
error -19: -ENODEV (No such device)
error -110: -ETIMEDOUT (Connection timed out)
error -108: -ESHUTDOWN (Cannot send after transport endpoint shutdown)

So these are not all the same issue and should be handled separately.

From my comment (2): I have retested my USB device on Debian and it is working fine. I only see one or two "firmware error" messages when unplugging, which is understandable.

From my comment (3): It looks like the firmware in Ubuntu 11.10, Debian sid, and the Linux firmware repository (found at http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git) all match up. So there should be no descrepancy between different distributions. (i.e., what works on Debian Sid should work on Ubuntu and vice versa)

My lsusb output:
ID 0b05:1723 ASUSTek Computer, Inc. WL-167G v2 802.11g Adapter [Ralink RT73]