I am having a similar problem, using different hardware. It needs to be
reclassified as grave since there is a strong chance of data loss.
My rt73 devices (Edimax EW7318USG) were working fine a few months ago on the
same machines I am having failures on now.
Yesterday I tried to use one on an amd64 machine and experienced severe OS
failure (keyboard locked; can't reboot ; etc.)
Today I replicated the failure on an x86 machine, and on that machine the
keyboard didn't lock, but I still couldn't reboot as it froze during the
shutdown process.
More info to follow.
