[magisterludi71]

Nope.. Didn't do anything. In the meatime, however, I connected my Touch to my old laptop (an old Dell Inspiron 8600). I have to say I'm actually impressed how well tethering works. I guess this leaves only one culprit, my XP on Fusion on OS X. I guess somehow the usb connection through the virtual machine gets messed up and it takes a long time to recover. I tried to find a way to tether directly to the OS X using USB but apparently Apple was not as visionary in this regard. I think I found a lead for fixing the BT tethering problem (very slow, a known issue on the new MBPs), I'll work on it this afternoon and post a sticky if it works.
Please let me know if you have any idea of how to approach the USB via VMWare problem and thanks again for your help.