Motorola Droid 3 :: USB Icon Missing In Notification Bar?

I recently upgraded from a Droid2 to a Droid3. My Droid3, when connected, via USB cable to my laptop (running Ubuntu) will charge (lightning bolt on the battery, etc), but no notification sound/icon allowing selection of USB mode. I have a cable I bought from the Verizon store. The same cable works with the droid2 still. I can swap from the droid3 to the droid2 and it would connect and my laptop would mount the sdcard (in usb mass storage mode). I have also tried at different computers at work. I had Verizon send me another refurbished droid3. It wouldn't connect either. Motorola Tier 2 tech walked me through the basic checks again, and had me do many combinations of turning on and off, and unplugging the battery, and factory resets to no avail. I asked the tech support to try it on one of their models and she said it worked there, coming up with a notification.

Next I went into a Verizon store, tested with a new cable and multiple computers there, and had an employee try with their droid3. Still no notification message with either of our phones! They said I should wait for update. I have 90days of warranty on this phone, should I wait for an update or maybe even ICS? or return it with hopes I just have seen three droid3's in a row with this problem, and they are not all like this? Or even possibly a different phone? (i like the droid 3 otherwise).