MacBook – USB device drawing too much power resulting in whining fan noise

It could be a corrupt USB kernel extension. I'd try booting to Safe Mode:

1. Turn off your Mac.
2. Turn it back on and before you see the Apple logo on your screen, press and hold the Shift key until the Apple logo appears.
3. A progress bar should appear below the Apple logo - during this time your Mac is performing a directory check and loads only necessary Apple kernel extensions (among other small things).

A feature of Safe Mode is that it reloads the kernel extensions from scratch, instead of from a cache file. It could be that during the Lion upgrade a kernel extension was damaged and has been cached afterwards.

Try the Safe Mode boot and see how it goes.

Good Luck!

Sounds like a problem with the audio format. Open the Audio MIDI Setup application, select your USB device, and try different combinations for audio format (sampling rate, channel/bit-depth).

If your device is locked at a sample rate and/or bit-depth, this should be a workaround. Try creating a Multi-Output Device with your device and the Built-in Output. (note: with the multi-output, you will have to set the volume on each device individually)

1. Click the + icon at the bottom left and select Create Multi-Output Device.
2. Under the "use" column, select Built-in Output and your device.
3. Set the Master Device to Built-in Output. This will allow you to choose different sample rates based on what is allowed for Built-in Output.
4. Lower the volume on Built-in Output (essentially muting it so sound only goes through your device)
5. Right-click on your device under the Multi-Output Device and check Resample this subdevice.
6. In System Preferences > Sound, change the output device to the Multi-Output Device.

Now you can change the sample rate of the multi-output device.