I gotta tell ya buddy, that's some exotic hardware. . .every third boot works with Kubuntu?
Something in this mix is re-setting at run time, or so it seems. Kubuntu is essentially a Debian based distro, and obviously has sooomething a little more in the way of probe and detectioon routines than what is incorporated in Knoppix (also Debian based) but this third boot success is truly wierd.