Zooz ZST39LR Z-Wave controller USB stick preventing boot on RPi 3b+

I have a brand new Raspberry PI 3B+ with 1GB ram along with a new Zooz ZST39LR Z-Wave controller. I’m running a fresh install of Home Assistant OS version 12.3 and core version 2024.5.5. Installed the requisite integrations/add-ons to get Z-Wave JS UI operational then included a single Zooz temperature/humidity sensor. That’s all I’ve done. Everything was working fine for several days.

I have a monitor and keyboard on the Pi to observe boot progress. Now, if I reboot or cycle power on the Pi, the boot process gets to the HAOS command line prompt “ha >”. A minute or two later, kernel messages begin to appear. Highly technical stuff like “Failed to get throttled (-110)” and various interrupt/processor related messages. After about 5 minutes of this, the Pi reboots and the process repeats. The HA web interface never becomes available.

If I unplug the USB stick, the Pi boots up normally. After boot and HA is operational I can plug in the stick and it works fine. Ugh. Updating the stick’s firmware from 1.2 to 1.3 didn’t change anything.

Before initiating an RMA on the stick, I thought I’d ask the community in case there’s any other ideas out there.

Could be this issue:

You could try downgrading to HAOS 12.2. Or try the stick in another PC.

Oh my. That’s it. Thank you. I’ll work on a downgrade now.