any magic to get Win98 guest to see USB devices?

[kenyee]

Host is VirtualBox 1.5.4 on Windows XP host.

I'm trying to do simple stuff like get Win98 to see a USB to parallel port convertor, and a flash memory reader.
I tried adding filters for these devices in virtual box (not adding filters didn't help either). The virtual box USB driver is already installed on XP and claims it's installed properly in device manager.

In the menu for the Win98 guest window, I can choose Devices\USBDevices, then choose one and I get this error that others have seen, but I have no clue what this means

USB device 'ATEN UC-1284B ATEN UC-1284B Printer Cable' with UUID {6690def2-8bb0-490c-ac20-e4bdc84910aa} is busy (waiting for a pending state change). Please try later.
Result Code:
E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057)
Component:
Host
Interface:
IHost {81729c26-1aec-46f5-b7c0-cc7364738fdb}
Callee:
IConsole {1dea5c4b-0753-4193-b909-22330f64ec45}

[kenyee]

In the settings for your Win98 VM in Virtualbox, go to the USB filters.

Click the first button to add an empty filter. This is the "everything" filter.
After that, add filters to disable all USB devices you don't want available.

Start up the VM, then go to Device\USBDevice and choose the USB device. Win98 will now see the device.
Thanks to Stanley in this thread for this weird workaround:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... ate+change
I'll write this up as a bug.

Unfortunately, now it can only read from the USB device (a parallel port driver that I'm trying to test w/ a printer). I can't write to it...it gives an "there was an error writing to LPT1" even though it detects that the printer is idle