Belkin F1U400 4x4 USB Peripheral Switch (12 Mbps)

The switch *blinks*. When a USB component is plugged into it, the box indicates this by blinking an LED for that component. The blinking is very distracting, and the design of the LEDs (lots of curves) would make it difficult to cover them up. I've ended up hiding the switch behind my monitor.

The box has four buttons to swap USB components among hosts. Pressing a button once lights up the current host. You then need to press it again to start cycling through the list. The box waits for input for five seconds; only after those five seconds are complete does it reconnect the component. Any other button presses in that time cancel the change. This means that switching from one machine to another is far more laborious than with a normal KVM (particularly if you're switching a keyboard and a mouse separately).

Because I'm operating in a mixed Windows/Unix environment, I haven't installed the Windows switching software.

The F1U400 is probably a reasonable approach for components like printers, mass storage devices and scanners, which won't be moving from machine to machine with nearly the frequency of keyboards and mice. You'll have to hide the LEDs, though.