Since a couple of months ago I am experiencing a weird problem with one of my usb ports of my MacBook Pro late 2011. When I restart the system in the normal automatic way, the port that is located closer to the screen stop working right after the loading of the drivers (I can monitor that it works by looking at the lights of an attached mouse). I can also confirm that the moment that it stops is right after loading the drivers, since the same happens while booting in the verbose mode.

Strangely enough, if I boot the machine through a false recovery mode, that is with cmd-R combination keys and then choosing the same usual drive to boot from, the port works normally.

Could someone give me a reasonable explanation and perhaps cure to this behavior? Do the booting with cmd-R keys look for different drivers than the automatic one?

Any other suggestions (I have tryed everything recommended on hardware reset -smc, nvram, etc.-, so I am preety confident that it is a software problem but I would not like to go on reinstalling the full system to try)

By the way, I run OS X 10.7.5

Thanks in advance