I just booted up a copy of Mandriva One 2009, running from a Live CD and it
reads all of my USB ports and memory sticks without a glitch.

I may be able to get Ubuntu to acknowledge the USB ports on my mother board and
read the memory sticks with some more work, but I may just move on to Mandriva
for the time being.

So ...... it looks like Ubuntu is not a good match for my hardware and as an
added bonus Mandriva also runs without a problem on my Vista x64 box, nice ....

I have serious video problems with Ubuntu on the Vista box, but Mandriva
properly identified my video card and installed the proper drivers with just a
tiny bit of help from me.

I would like to thank everyone here who helped with my USB problem,