I've experienced this with multiple machines and multiple pieces of hardware.
The system never beeps, there's no screen display from the POST. Sometimes removing the offending device lets the system continue, sometimes you have to remove it and then power cycle the machine to get it to boot.
The devices always work correctly if they are plugged in later. Usually any time after POST works but 30 minutes ago I hung this box by plugging it in just after the Starting Windows screen appeared.
This only happens with powered devices. On an older machine I figured out there must be some power being fed backwards through the USB wire on the offending device as the board-is-hot light was on with the power supply unplugged--but it went out as soon as I unplugged the offending hub.
A workaround is to ignore all motherboard ports and plug the devices only into an expansion card.
Is there any better answer?
Note that this is not a matter of trying to boot from the device. It can happen with devices that by no stretch of the imagination could boot. (For example, a hub.)