USB PORTS on the motherboard WORST INVENTION EVER.

They taste terrible, and aren't worth a damn after you try to grill one.

I may have been reading something wrongly but if the grounding is what you think is causing the buzzing could you not setup the system in the kitchen to see if it makes a difference? or run an extension lead?

Pete

SO is your 110V AC socket (in Hong Kong, it's 220V) ? You could short it easily as well! :)

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Be careful if you use a satellite dish with twin LNB, no grounding bloc, computer connected to one output, TV/STB connected to the other one. I seem to have killed one DVB card that way once.

Dunno. In the USofA, most everything is 3 wires, one of which is protective ground. There are still plenty of 2 wire systems, with no protective ground still in use. If you look hard, you'll also find ancient tube and socket wiring. Maybe your house is old?

The buzzing worries me. I had a similar problem in my house. Occasionally, I would hear what sounded like the plumbing under the house buzzing. It didn't seem to be affected by anything I did in the house. It remained a puzzle for about a year. I wrapped a clamp-on AC ammeter around some of the copper water pipes and found several amps of current. Not good. I phoned the power company, who told me to call an electrician, who then yelled at someone at the power company, which eventually fixed it. Sorry, but I never obtained a clear explanation of what was miswired or had failed. Had the water pipe come loose, I could easily have found live power on the plumbing.

Blowing up the USB port could be an indication of something more dangerous. I would have someone with electrical wiring experience give your wiring an inspection.

Isn't Skybuckaroo in the Netherlands?

Maybe the kitchen was renovated at some point and the older style ungrounded outlets were replaced with the Schuko grounded type.

Normally, this being a design group, I'd suggest poking around with a multimeter, but your suggestion is conservative and probably correct in this case.

I think so, but I sometimes suspect he lives on some alien planet.

I have no idea how it's done in Europe. Locally, we have houses with a mixture of 3 and 2 wire connectors. That's allowed. However, what's NOT allowed are 3 wire connectors, with only 2 wires going to the outlet and no protective ground.

I would hate to tabulate what percentage of articles in sci.electronics.design is relevant to design. Offhand, it's less than half. I suspect my contribution to off topic discussions isn't helping much.

I base my suggestion of hiring an electrician or at least someone with a clue not so much on Mr Skybuck's obvious ineptitude and inexperience with all things electronic and electrical, but rather on my experience with my buzzing plumbing. I consider myself reasonably astute but had difficulty determining the exact nature of the problem. Various tests didn't show anything to be defective or miswired. Placing the clamp on ammeter around the water pipe was totally by accident. I was measuring the total current drawn by my pile of test equipment and simply hung the ammeter on the pipe while I was wiggling around under the house. When I saw that there was an indication, I immediately associated the effect to the buzzing pipes problem. Without electrical wiring experience, I don't think Mr Skybuck has any hope of recognizing a wiring problem even if it electrocuted him in the process. Not wishing to see his name in the next annual Darwin Awards, I suggested having someone else test his wiring as the safest approach.