Reserve a USB port in XP Mode

Question

We are running a Windows 7 Professional x64 environment and have some legacy applications that are only suported under Windows XP x86. Most of these run fine, however one of them uses ActiveSync to connect via USB to a PDA. every time you undock/dock the device, the connection is released from the guest and ActiveSync starts up on the host.

I know with VirtualBox you can reserve a USB port for the guest (effectively hijacking it and making it invisible to the host). Is it possible to do this with XP Mode? Also, if it is possible, is it possible to make this persistant, so that a certain USB port will only ever be accessible to the XP guest?

Answer 1

This app can make the USB device mountpoints persistent. Seems the only one on the market.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

As for USB passthrough to the XP Mode guest you might want to try something like the USB over IP project over at sourceforge:

http://usbip.sourceforge.net/

Or maybe this higher-end commercial USB IP solution:

http://www.digi.com/products/usb/anywhereusb.jsp#overview