I'm starting to wonder if I made a mistake grinding the prongs on my cables. Potentially I've increased the amount of time until my usb port fails. If I happened to extend it too long, my port (which was likely to fail during the warranty period) may now fail outside the warranty period. If that happens I'm SOL, and really screwed myself.

I won't consider this issue resolved until there is some kind of official resolution for devices that have this flaw and fail outside of warranty.