G'day hartiq, I was recently given an old box with Win XP where the
previous owner claimed the USB no longer worked and had been going faulty for several months as it kept turning off on him after a few hours. I loaded Zorin OS Linux on it and have been using it for five weeks with the USB working perfectly all along. After two weeks I replaced the PS2 keyboard and mouse (yes, it's that old) with USB ones, never an issue.
The printer I have is an old Minolta colour laser which originally hooked up to Windows with a USB cable. Since then I've hooked it up to six different variants of Linux after I couldn't get Win XP drivers for it. Yes, it's that old too.
I suspect a lot of the issues with USB devices are not the hardware, but poor quality USB controls in the software or the the device drivers. I often have people telling me a certain USB device is now faulty, but it works perfectly when I hook it up to one of my Linux systems, regardless of the hardware age.
Mind you, if your Windows OS has controllers for earlier levels of USB I'd not be surprised to find it's having trouble working with later levels of USB devices or even recognising them.
