I had an old Dell Latitude D810 on which I ran Win XP as both host and guest under Workstation 6.0, and had USB 2.
After 8 years good use the screen packed in so I moved to a Samsung 550P7C. It has Win 8 and USB3 plus USB2 ports, 8GB memory and 8 Intel CPU's. First I upgraded to Workstation 6.5 as guests under 6.0 kept crashing. However none of my USB devices worked properly so I installed Workstation 9 as a trial. Whatever I do though, my XP guests receive only USB 1 performance at best.
My printer HP1015 (USB2) takes 120 seconds to print a picture (Before it would take 5 seconds).
My scanner Canon 210 (USB2) takes 90 seconds to scan a page at 200 dpi (before it would take 10 seconds).
My Seagate Backup Plus Desktop USB 3 external drive is not visible, but hangs the guest until it is unplugged. (Before, on the old system, the drives contents would be visible after 20 seconds in the guest).
Also the sound from the guest is terrible being all broken up unlike on the old Dell.
The lack of scanner functionality is what affects me the most. I've tried installing the latest scanner driver (within the XP guest), upgrading VM machine hardware compatibility to 9, installing the latest VMware tools, connecting the USB devices through USB2 extension cable, connecting the scanner to each USB3 port then to each USB2 port, disabling the host xHCI driver (and re-enabled), rebooting the guest for each combination, changing the VM USB controller compatibility from USB2 to USB1.1 (even tried USB3, but drivers were needed for the guest, and there are none for Intel under XP. The host USB driver provided by Microsoft - UCX01000.SYS, USBXHCI.SYS & USBHUB3.SYS File version 6.2.9200.16384 (win8_rtm.120725-1247) seems to be the latest version - I've also updated Windows 8 with all the updates available.
Is there any way to deliver USB 2.0 performance for XP guest when USB compatibility is set to 2.0?
I would be very grateful for any suggestions.