Question : Problem: USB Flash Drives Causing System Freeze

i have built a system for a church sound booth. system is built in an antec sonata III quiet case, and (as i have seen in the past, is well grounded).

the vista install (this is my third time starting over) went smoothly, but the installation of easyworship resulted in a freeze the initial run, after a restart, it went smooth also.

i should preface, by freeze i mean the displayed image on the monitor remains, but the mouse, keyboard become unresponsive. ctrl/alt/del does not work, the system must be restarted with the power button or psu switch.

now as we have started to use it again, we noticed quite often when we touch the case with a usb stick, it causes the freezing. usually as soon as the usb stick touches any of the metal around the front usb slots, it freezes. doesn't matter which usb stick we try.

fixes tried so far:
1) looked into seagate hdd (for that known firmware issue, i've had other drives go down). the drive was marked affected, so i updated the firmware. upon an entire reformat, it was still freezing. tried another seagate drive, which was not affected, reformatted again, still freezing.
2) tried hooking up a apc battery backup between computer and plug, instead of power bar, to see if there was a building ground fault problem, there was not. system also freezes at my place.
3) have run all hdd diagnostics, memory diagnostics, prime95, etc a million times. it NEVER freezes during any of those procedures.

and just to throw one more oddity in here, the one time i plugged a usb stick in, it didn't freeze, but started installig usb drivers for the device, then froze just before initiallizing a drive letter for the device.

any clue where to start? i have looked for places where mobo could be shorting, but couldn't find anything along that line...

Answer : Problem: USB Flash Drives Causing System Freeze

Sounds like you may be having some sort of problem with static and/or grounding.  The fact that you don't actually plug the USB stick in tells us that the problem is physical rather than software (after all, the computer does not know by proximity that you have a USB in your hand).  I suspect you could grab any old piece of metal and reproduce the symptoms.

I would look carefully where the USB ports connect to the case.  Be sure you don't have any type of shorts there.  Make sure the case is grounded as well as the circuit board (outside of the USB ports should ground to the case unless it is all plastic).

If the system is turned on but not doing anything (e.g. just at the main Windows) does it run fine or eventually freeze up?