Vivanco PCC USB 2.0 trips Dell Inspiron 2100's internal circuit breaker

[Aaron Bingham <abingham@alumni.sfu.ca>]

Hello all,

I recently purchased a Vivianco Cardbus to USB 2.0 adaptor (Model no. 
14359), which is listed as linux compatible at 
http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showctrl.php?id=69.

Unfortunately as soon as I insert the card into the CardBus slot of my 
running Dell Inspiron 2100, the internal circuit breaker of my laptop 
trips.  If I insert the card before powering on the laptop, the boot 
process makes it some way into the "Discovering Hardware" phase before 
tripping the circuit breaker.  Presumably this is the point at which the 
OS attempts to initialize the card.  The breaker is tripped even if I 
have no USB devices plugged into the adapter.

I am running Debian Sarge with a custom built 2.6.4 vanilla kernel.

Any ideas what could be going on here?

Thanks,

Aaron