Thanks for the valuable info. I'm thinking I will send it over to sEKI to do the repair. It looks/sounds like the kind of thing I'd get my wife to help me with, holding bits while I figured out what bit to touch to what other bit. I've done some soldering in the past but it must be about 15 years ago at least, and it was a lot simpler stuff. And with a new baby in the house there's not much free surface space and I wont have my glamorous assistant available.
I tell ya, the gremlins have really invaded my house this year. Every electrical gadget or gizmo should avoid me like the plague lol. I'm like the touch of death to them. Although I definitely suspect in this case nokia replaced my old n900 with one that had a usb almost ready to die. If they were still producing them I'd send it back again to make them pay for making this wonderful device, then designing it to break after so many hundred, or thousand plug-ins

EDIT: This time my plug-in count didn't even reach 100. Might not even have reached 50, due to me using my galaxy note as my every day phone and the n900 for only ocasional other stuff.