Windows – After plugging in a USB device, Win7 severely slows. What causes this and how could it be fixed

This is the second PC undergoing this condition, both running Win7. On PC1 a Logitech device was connected through USB before installing it's branded driver (allowing windows to auto-install it), and PC2, a Wacom device was connected under similar conditions (windows auto-installed prior to installing the driver from the brand website). Since PC1 has been trashed, I'm mostly interested in reviving PC2.

**Note/Update: One common detail to mention is that the hardware was purchased new, however the devices were several years old at the time of connecting. I didn't spray or wipe dust (as there was no visible accumulation). Would there have been enough to cause an esd protection failure, yet not enough to disable any noticeable functionality? Could it be a bad cable? (It uses micro-usb and I may not have used the one that the device was shipped with.)

It's experiencing extreme slowness. Whereas I would formerly have been able to have multiple chrome windows open, now having anything more than two or three open is a joke.

There is very frequent HDD chirping which wasn't present beforehand. With barely anything open (just the few chrome windows), everything is painfully slow and overall, there is a higher occurrence of freezing and lagging, i.e. moving tabs, opening a new tab (takes up to 5 seconds vs. being almost instantaneous pre usb-hookup), activating a chrome window, loading a page, editing the address bar, maximizing, dragging or resizing a window, closing tabs, anything windows related such as navigating through the start menu or running explorer. However, in the absence of keyboard or mouse input, the HDD chirping eventually fades. Examining activity, it is pretty normal at rest (i.e. Idle Process is in the high 80's) and when not at rest the task at hand consumes an inordinate percentage of CPU.

When right clicking on the desktop, there is generally a wait of up to 30 seconds before the hourglass reverts to a cursor. Almost any mouse or keyboard action activates intense HDD chirping and Win lagging. PC2 is less than one year old, with 4GB of RAM and an Intel-G2030.

What caused this condition? and is there any way this can be fixed or avoided? It seems to have been inadvertently reproduced amongst these two PC's.

Is it worth starting a system restore, and would it actually change anything, especially in this sensitive condition (I've experienced anxious cases in which system restore lasted 1-2 hrs). I've read some posts about a 'bad' chip driver being responsible for this type of behavior. Is it possible that either of these devices somehow caused physical damage to the board by being plugged in? Would swapping out the HD or installing the OS in a new partition have any effect?

I feel that the best bet would be an attempt to reinstall windows on a new partition, but I'd like to garner tips on avoiding a recurrence of this issue as PC's and USB devices were built to work together and not to cripple each other. I.e., would having had inserted a wall-powered USB-multiplier as a buffer thwarted this problem all together?

<———————UPDATE—————————->

Thanks for the first response below. Using the suggested software, these are the summarized results after 1-2 minutes.

Under Main (the times vary, and are approximate), with increasing severity:

0:00: Message 1:

Your system appears to be suitable for handling real-time audio and other tasks without dropouts.

0:07: Message 2:

Your system seems to have difficulty handling real-time audio and other taks. You may experience drop out, clicks or pops due to buffer underruns. One problem may be related to pwer management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates.

0:09: Message 3:

Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One of more DPC routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. At least one detected problem appears to be network related. In case you are using a WLAN adapter, try disabling it to get better results. One problem may be related to pwer management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates.

interrupt to process current: I see it varying between 100 and 6000us
interrupt to process hi: 31993us
isr hi: 94us, ndis.sys
dpc hi, 9236us, ndis.sys
pagefault resolution hi: 448708us

Under Drivers:

[ordered by total]
ndis.sys exec: 9.2ms hi, 1600ms total 
usbport.sys exec:, .14ms hi, 400ms total
rspLLL64.sys exec: (highest DPC count), 
iastor.sys
tcpip.sys

Additionally, using the 'My Dell' tool (http://www.dell.com/support/contents/us/en/19/article/Product-Support/Self-support-Knowledgebase/software-and-downloads/support-center), it tells me that under Device Manager, there is one device without a driver (Ethernet controller) which is somewhat consistent with LatencyMon reporting NDIS lagging. I Installed ethernet and other drivers from (http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/inspiron-660s/drivers) with the exception of high-risk updates such as bios and firmware and one or two updates had errors.

When disabling both the Wlan and lan, I still get Message3 right after opening any program (including chrome) and the high-use drivers listed are tcpip.sys, usbport.sys, nbit.sys and storeport.sys, and at one point Hal.dll also has a high isr count.

Still high-latency, performance has not appreciably changed.

Would it be worthwhile to disconnect the hardware (tried) and uninstall its driver?

Update: Used ShellEx to disable all non-Microsoft items, with unnoticeable performance improvement.