I already mentioned I think it's a largly an incompatibility between the motherboards inbuilt usb hub and the receiver itself; its possible the one dongle is malfunctioning - dmesg hasnt shown any faults. It really hasn't bothered me too much to spend the time debugging.

Logitech unifying receiver. There's another box connected just the same, right next to it with zero issue.

As a work around, I just use a second mouse and don't flip it over to change channels every time I swap pc.