The only bluetooth battery-powered-dongle things I've seen are for audio. In other words, plug a dongle into your stereo's headphone jack, pair it with a set of bluetooth earphones, and now your stereo is bluetooth.



You don't actually need to use a computer to pair a standalone bluetooth dongle with a headset. You simply hold down the pairing button on both devices until the blinky lights tell you they're paired. Not that that's going to help you here, I don't think, I just wanted to mention it since your post mentioned it.



With my understanding of the way bluetooth devices work, I don't think you can solve your problem here with some kind of bluetooth dongle. I think that the host has to talk directly to the connected USB device so that the host can read the device's serial number directly and that the device driver can work. When you plug a bluetooth USB dongle into a computer, the computer isn't trying to talk to the device on the other end of the bluetooth connection. It's talking to the bluetooth dongle, and then the bluetooth dongle reports the types of capabilities that it wants to expose (audio, microphone, etc.).

What you're looking for here, is some kind of wireless USB hub, something designed specifically to "cut the cord" on USB devices. Such a thing wouldn't use bluetooth, since USB can have data rates faster than bluetooth.

I wonder if such a thing exists?

Hm, googling:

http://www.iogear.com/product/GUWH104KIT/

Wonder if something in that category would work?