USB questions

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop about 4 years old, it has a three USB ports a SD card reader network port and a HDMI out port.
I have a seven port USB hub plugged into the one of the USP ports on the laptop, that I use for my printer, scanner keyboard, wireless mouse, a USB to serial port converter to control my HF radio, battery charger and memory card reader.
My problem is for some reason the two of usb ports and card reader on the laptop will stop working.
The port with the hub never does that.
When I go into device manager under USB controllers there are 21 different USB controllers and composite devices and some have a little yellow triangle with exclamation point inside.
If I disable then enable the ports, they will work for a while, then stop.
Also some of the ports are listed more than once (example there is three listings for the USB composite device and three listing for the standard open HCD USB host controller).
Could some of these have somehow become duplicated, and can they be safely be deleted?

 

Well if it was my laptop. I would delete the ports with the yellow triangles (that means they are not working) reboot the computer and let it detect and install the usb ports from scratch. Now there is a possiblity that it could go south and not be able to detect the ports. The USB information shown in the device manager is always confusing. I think what is going on is that the 7 port USB hub is just confusing the laptop.

 

Thanks I will try that. I do have a recovery disk. I will back up what I care about.