XiCam Project on Hold until USB Issue is Solved

USB host controller on the HP appears to be broken.  From what I'm reading, the driver is owned by Microsoft, and resides on the chipset, which partially explains why reinstalling Ubuntu didn't solve the problem.  I have the recovery disks, so I'm going to try to do the recovery tonight.  If that works, then I'll install Ubuntu on a VM instead of having that as the main OS.  This might cause some difficulty passing USB connections through, but I'd rather deal with that than breaking the driver again, then having to go through this mess all over again.  Here's the details of what I've done so far:

• SD card reader still worked, so I used the 8GB micro SD I found for the camera to save my latest work.
• Did fresh install of Ubuntu.  This solved the infinite login loop problem, but not the USB issue.
• Tried following the advice here (link), but that didn't work.  I did, however, notice that the system recognized a device was there, it just wasn't responsive.
• I wanted to keep the 8GB card in the camera, so I used the card reader to move the saved data to the 32GB card in my phone and wiped the data from the 8GB card.

I did a full factory restore on the HP, but that still didn't fix the USB issue.  Plugged in the mouse and Windows said the device wasn't recognized.  Opened up the device manager and uninstalled all of the USB device drivers.  After hitting check for new devices, they all came back and no errors came up, but USB ports still didn't work.  The next step is to do a BIOS update.  After that, I'm not sure what else to do.