So after putting together a new PC for the first time and excitedly booting up Dolphin to see how much better it will run games than my old laptop, I ran into a rather annoying hurdle where the Mayflash GCN adapter, which was working just fine for me on my old Windows 7 computer, was suddenly choking up a lot in Windows 8. After uninstalling and reinstalling drivers a bunch and fixing nothing in the process, I did some further research and eventually discovered what the problem was.
It turns out that the Mayflash adapter doesn't like USB 3.0 very much. And if your situation is like mine was, then just plugging the adapter into a USB 2.1/2.0/1.1 slot doesn't solve the problem because USB 3.0 is designed to handle all the old standards in a single module (XHCI, or eXtensible Host Controller Interface) as opposed to USB 2.0's EHCI. In other words, your USB 2.0 ports can be 'controlled' by the USB 3.0 drivers instead of the legacy ones even if they're still only outputting at 2.0 speeds. Which in our case is causing some issues.
So to fix this problem, you have to set things up so that your USB 2.0 ports are controlled by EHCI instead of XHCI. This needs to be configured in your motherboard's BIOS. I imagine that the specific settings will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but for my Gigabyte GB-Z87-HD3 motherboard I pulled it off by changing these settings:
XHCI Mode: Manual
XHCI Hand-off: Enabled
EHCI Hand-off: Enabled
Setting XHCI Mode to Manual then opened up a further set of options where I was able to independently route the USB 2.0 ports to EHCI while keeping the USB 3.0 ports driven by XHCI
There is one more thing though: I had to convert my Windows 8 drive from MBR/legacy BIOS to GPT/UEFI before the above fixes worked for me. Maybe that won't be necessary for everyone but I'm just throwing that out there in case you aren't having luck making things work.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone else out there who's been dealing with these annoying Dolphin crashes. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything too.
It turns out that the Mayflash adapter doesn't like USB 3.0 very much. And if your situation is like mine was, then just plugging the adapter into a USB 2.1/2.0/1.1 slot doesn't solve the problem because USB 3.0 is designed to handle all the old standards in a single module (XHCI, or eXtensible Host Controller Interface) as opposed to USB 2.0's EHCI. In other words, your USB 2.0 ports can be 'controlled' by the USB 3.0 drivers instead of the legacy ones even if they're still only outputting at 2.0 speeds. Which in our case is causing some issues.
So to fix this problem, you have to set things up so that your USB 2.0 ports are controlled by EHCI instead of XHCI. This needs to be configured in your motherboard's BIOS. I imagine that the specific settings will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but for my Gigabyte GB-Z87-HD3 motherboard I pulled it off by changing these settings:
XHCI Mode: Manual
XHCI Hand-off: Enabled
EHCI Hand-off: Enabled
Setting XHCI Mode to Manual then opened up a further set of options where I was able to independently route the USB 2.0 ports to EHCI while keeping the USB 3.0 ports driven by XHCI
There is one more thing though: I had to convert my Windows 8 drive from MBR/legacy BIOS to GPT/UEFI before the above fixes worked for me. Maybe that won't be necessary for everyone but I'm just throwing that out there in case you aren't having luck making things work.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone else out there who's been dealing with these annoying Dolphin crashes. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything too.