How much are you looking to spend?

In 2003, I bought a second-hand IBM PII-266 from a shop called Simply Laptops 
in Scottsdale.  They seemed nice enough (sold it to me with a DOA battery, 
and they replaced it with a new one).  It cost me 300 at the time; dunno what 
they have now.

Older Toshibas and IBMs have very good reputations for reliability; I 
personally now lean to IBM cos I love the eraser pointer.  Check the memory 
expandability.  I maxed out mine with 96M!

I'm not sure if early USB hardware was always 1000 percent functional.  I 
never needed a USB device for mine (PCMCIA 802.11b card was enough)

For like USD 500, Fry's often has their house-brand laptops ("Great Quality" 
:D) with like VIA C3 processors at 1200MHz; these perform far weaker than 
their clock speed indicates (maybe like a PIII-600 or 900) but they'll be 
warrantied, and come with WinXP and a new battery I'd expect.  Adding more memory 
might be cheaper too... you could probably bump one to 512M inexpensively.