Safat:
MY GOODNESS!I just got home and used my USB cable for the condenser mic that I have and it started working! Didn't have to do anything. Autodetection and I even managed to program the LED (pin 13) to blink in the pattern I wanted it to blink with!
Thank you so much
I'm starting to suspect that the reason we see this plague of bad USB cables is that a vendor is selling a bad batch of cables with arduino kits...