usb, wifi stuck after sleep

[meeotch]

A problem that's just cropped up on my W500: after resuming from sleep (not hibernation) via lid-close, I noticed that sometimes the USB ports wouldn't respond to plugging in devices. It happened again just now, and in poking around, I realized that I couldn't disable/enable the wifi and wired network adapters, and Access Connections continued to show a connected wired connection, even though there was no ethernet cable plugged in. I pulled up the Device Manager and did a "refresh", which also hung. I pulled up the Task Manager and killed off processes one by one but never regained full control. Then on restart, the machine hung at the "Shutting Down" screen, and had to be hard reset. The problem is intermittent - I may go days or weeks without it happening. Sometimes on a fresh boot, it will sit with a blank desktop and spin for a looong time as if something is preventing it from running through the list of startup programs - this, too, is infrequent.

So it feels very much like a device driver that's gotten "blocked" somehow. Any idea what steps I can take to track down which device is causing the problem, short of living without e.g. network connectivity for a week, then USB, etc.?

There's not much of interest in the logs. I am seeing these on re-start:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Launch permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{C97FCC79-E628-407D-AE68-A06AD6D8B4D1}

and these:

: The embedded controller (EC) returned data when none was requested. The BIOS might be trying to access the EC without synchronizing with the operating system. This data will be ignored. No further action is necessary; however, you should check with your computer manufacturer for an upgraded BIOS.

I haven't changed the BIOS in years, nor installed much of anything recently, and this is the first time I'm seeing this blocking behavior.