If you read why PLAMACAM use the parallel port to talk to their external motion controller box, you may understand why USB is hopeless.
Read:-
http://plasmacam.com/faqdetail.php?fid=14The USB cable is like an antennae collecting electromagnetic radiation.
A portable wood router runs at 50/60cycles. That is very low frequency. If you use a VFD spindle you are going up to Higher Frequency. If you run at bigger machine at higher ipm speed, the pulse to drive the motors are becoming much higher frequency.
A shorter USB cable may help. A quality USB cable usually has 2 ferrite sleeves one at each end premolded in. Simple 5 volts signal devices like the USB are unstable because it only needs 1 to 2 volts spikes to affect the signals. Wraping grounded aluminum foil around the whole length of your USB cable can help too.
The Ethernet is better than USB because they use differential amplifiers on both ends of the twisted-pair cable. HF will affect both twisted cables but since the signal is always a difference between the two wires it is NOT affected by EM noise.
The most robust is still the PARALLEL PORT.
That's why PlasmaCAM running on Windows 10 x64 still use the Parallel port to talk to their external motion controller.
Unfortunately MACH3 needs 32bits win7 to use the parallel port.