I did it and it seemed straight forward from what i can remember. You
only need a 1gb stick plug in and click the menubar - so there must be
something up if you can't do that. Your pc must be able to boot on a
usb and so you need to change setting in the bios.

I understand the part about being able to boot from a USB stick. I still
need to confirm that or try to update the BIOS which may or may not be
possible. But my burn program will not allow me to change the disk to
copy to, it only wants to go to the CD/DVD drive. Do you know of a free
ware burn program I can download to use to copy the ISO image to other
than the CD/DVD drive?

If your computer was made in this century, it almost certainly can boot from
USB.

You can make a live USB drive easily by using Unetbootin. but for this Ubuntu
is a little too big. It would occupy a little less than 700 MB of space on your
flash drive. For a live USB drive I would recommend something smaller. like Slax
or Puppy or Damn Small Linux. This way you can use a greater space on your flash
drive for other purposes.

No, you can not use a DVD burner program to make a live USB stick. There is a
tool http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
But Ubuntu would be a little too slow run from a USB stick and it occupies much
space.

I built the usb stick boot for Ubuntu 9.04 from within Ubunto, on the system
menu. I used a 2 2GB stick and it works great, as long as the computer you use
it on can boot from USB.

The program you want is Unetbootin.

You will probably need to go into the BIOS setup of the laptop to change the
first boot device to "USB hard drive." Different BIOSes use a different
keystroke to get there; Del is popular.

A 1 GB drive is big enough. I actually found that an 8 GB drive was awkward; I
wound up formatting it to NTFS. You want to make sure the USB drive is marked
"bootable" in Gparted.

Just run the latest 9.04 cd and there is an option there to make a USB
stick bootable (look at the tabs, probably 'admin')