I just ordered a pair of these from Amazon and it seems the pads are "broken."  On the xbox dashboard, the pads will navigate all over the menus without anyone so much as looking at them.  One pad primarily is pressing "up" at the wrong time and the other pad seems to prefer "down" and Y.

I have plush carpet, could that be part of the problem?  Do we need to do something to straighten out the mats?  Did I just luck out and get two junkers?

I'm also using a hub.  It's the same USB 2.0 hub that we use for Rock Band where it works fine.  I would straight connect the pads, but the xbox is about 8 feet behind us, so it makes connecting the cords difficult.