[WALL-E]

 

  OK, this was what I thought. Now it makes sense to me. Thanks a lot!
 
Btw, I see you have combined orange,white and green, white for the ground and power. So coloring doesn't matter? I have some ethernet cable lying around so I will give it a shot. Around 2 meters is what I need but I can go with less as well.

Yep that's right, look they are the same twisted in pairs. Within pair of twisted cables color doesn't matter, on condition, if you use for example (white&orange) for power combined together (in order to reduce resistance and voltage drop) soldered to the pin 1 of the type A connectot  u have to do this the same on the other end with type B connector pin 1(white&orange) this analogy also applies to GND pin 4 (white& green). Data  D+/D- in my case is blue an white.
 

   
Ground loops you say? On the cable? I have all my equipment into a power strip which is connected to a surge protector which then goes into a grounded socket. When I actually discovered the cable was fixing the issue, I was on a laptop not connected in a different room.....I made all sorts of experiments

I thought rather the ground loop it can make somewhere between laptop and other equipment and the short 10cm usb is just a link but I can be wrong, anyway is worth to try and run the laptop on battery and see what happen.