I have been using Sun VirtualBox to build virtual machines for the past couple years.  To this point, I rarely had any interest in using USB devices through my host machine.  I picked up a Lexmark X4580 multi-function printer for free, plugged it in, and found that it was not immediately supported by my Ubuntu 9.10 box.  I searched around for about 30 minutes without success and moved on to some other projects.  I tried one of my Windows XP VMs with the expectation that I could simply download the drivers and plug-n-play my way to a simple solution.  Unfortunately, VirtualBox didn't recognize my USB device.  I updated my repositories and upgraded all applications, rebooted, and still had the same issue.  Upon visiting VirtualBox.org, I noticed that the current version advertised on the site was newer than the one installed through the Ubuntu repositories.