I just fixed (I think!) my daughter's Win 8.1 laptop using an external USB3 Seagate 3TB drive. It had become flaky and wouldn't allow her to save files to the external USB 3 drive. I tried to copy the files to her laptop HD but that would fail shortly after beginning and the external drive would disconnect with a USB error (some sort of USB set address failed, iirc).
I found this solution:
Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update: April 2014
And in particular:
Download Windows 8.1 Update for x64-based Systems (KB2919355) from Official Microsoft Download Center
On her laptop (fully updated drivers and chipset insofar as I know.. Slim Drivers and Win Update), there were several KBs that were not installed. I had to snag:
clearcompressionflag.exe
KB2932046
KB2937592
KB2938439
KB2934018
The laptop already had 2 of the KBs already installed, KB2919355 and KB2959977. The download instructions at the above linked site said they had to be installed in a particular order, so I installed the missing ones in the order provided. After that, I was able to copy all the files from the external drive without issue.
Seems like a Windows update broke something affecting the USB 3 drive. This had been a problem for my daughter for quite some time and I finally was able to get her laptop and investigate the issue. I'm not sure when the issue began.
Previous to this fix, I tried the registry fix using the last known parent, disabled USB selective suspend, etc. ... all to no avail. I am encouraged by my success in copying files back to the laptop HD without the USB drive losing connection. If my daughter has any more issues, I'll repost here. But otherwise, I am hopeful this has fixed the issue.
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Interesting note: I just looked at Event Viewer and found under Setup, 4 recent error entries (error 2359302) that correspond to the 4 above mentioned KBs that I tried to install. Apparently, only clearcompressionflag.exe ran. And maybe that was the fix. ??
Example error detail:
Windows update could not be installed because of error 2359302 "" (Command line: ""C:\WINDOWS\system32\wusa.exe" "C:\Downloads\Windows updates\Windows8.1-KB2932046-x64.msu" ")