USB stick recognized on one port but not on other

Good evenin' ever1

I've spent the whole day today trying to figure what's going, to no avail

I have a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 Motherboard with a Intel ICH8R south bridge.
Windows XP professional SP 2.
It has 6 on board usb connectors and 4 on the rear panel. Now, the problem is that

1. when I plugin a usb stick into any of the 4 Rear I/O panel USB ports it works fine except that once in a while I get the Parameter incorrect message, usually happens when reading big files, 200 MB and higher. After that if I go into windows explorer and open up the stick, no data is shown although it's still there.

2. When I plug in the usb stick into any of the 6 on board usb ports I get the message Device not recognized, sometimes it does not even say that. The usb stick does not show up in the windows explorer. I've tried this with 3 different sticks, same thing.
The BIOS that came with this motherboard has a boot option, I can choose from a menu what hard drive to boot from, it's strange but this menu shows any plugged in usb stick even when it's plugged into one of the 6 onboard usb ports.

I hope I can resolve this on my own, don't want to go to the store and let them fix this because they want the whole PC and it will most likely take them a while to do it.

I appreciate any help
Thanks a lot

Trey