Umm guess what? It's not the hub, genius.

Annoyingly the worst case scenario turns out to be the correct one - the USB ports on my netbook's right side seem to be going bad. Port 1 detects mice, but not drives or printers; port 2 detects mice and drives, but not printers. The port on the left is fine, and detects everything.
(Maybe it's a bad connection, and the loss of voltage affects different devices differently?)
But yeah. This is what you get for buying a cheap computer brand-new.