Short circuting USB port?

[Timothy Hobbs]

Hello List,

My name is Timothy Hobbs and I have an OLPC XO-1 G1G1 laptop.  Last
night, I came down stairs with a headset plugged in to the audio
ports(both a speaker and headphones.  I plugged in my keyboad+mouse,
which are attached to an unpowerd "Targus USB mobil port replicator with
ethernet"(to the usb port directly bellow the audio ports), and I heard
a little popping noise in my headphones, and the OLPC was instantly off!
I started up the computer again, and plugged in the port replicator, and
again the OLPC turned off.  Now I know that with just a speaker plugged
in, plugging in the replicator is fine, but I've been to ffraid to
experiment much.  School starts up in 2 weeks and I can't loose my
laptop to a short circut right now.

Possible steps to reproduce:

Plug in a speaker and microphone into the audio ports.
Plug in a usb device to the port just below the audio ports.

I don't really know what could be causing this, it is very surprising
bug.  One oddnes about my system is that a while back the camera stopped
working(on test it gives me error code -1) but that is on the other
side.  The other oddness is that I keep my olpc up on a windowsill, when
I use the keyboard, so there may be a sligt downward pressure on the usb
port when the replicator is plugged in, as you can imagine that might be
pushing the end of the usb port up into the audio ports(lever action)
But I don't think that is likely.

Anyways, I hope that this is just a really weird problem with my
individual laptop, which can be ignored.  But I wanted to get this bug
out anyways.

Timothy Hobbs