I could imagine some app (background service? Unsure) iterating through available devices and the OS or system services being a bit too eager to initialize devices upon iteration.
(Not saying that's what happened, but I can easily hypothesize a scenario where this only happens after a while, after some specific app is installed or configured.)
And it hasn't happened again since I reinstalled the OS two months ago (though admittedly it took ~4 months to start happening the first time).
Doesn't seem like a very big leap to me.