I was reading a mailing list which said too many sniffers can't see the initial handshake. 

SO if someone knows, that would be helpful.   I'll assume there is some invisible hardware handshaking going on which might not be loggable, so you can assume I expect that.

My interest is to reply to the GT Mailing list with a reply, but secondarily I have some USB devices myself in Windows that I might like to drive with an external device (say a USB OTG PIC based machine).

Thanks!