Hi everyone,
I copied Knoppix V3.3 2003-11-19 onto a CD and everything works like a charm. Kudos to Knoppix! My system has 4 'generic' USB 1.1 ports and I added a 4 port USB 2.0 PCI adapter. All the USB devices attached are accessible: printer, scanner, mouse (wireless), keyboard, UPS, everything. Now here's the catch:
I have a Sandisk Cruzer mini 256 MB USB flash drive, which works fine under XP (home) and W2k. When I boot Knoppix with the drive attached to any USB port, the system will freeze during bootup, sometimes it reaches the cool voice saying 'initiating startup sequ..sequ...sequ...sequ... (skipping record), and sometimes it won't even reach that point.When I insert the flash drive after bootup, nothing happens...
All this also happens (or rather does NOT happen ) on my laptop with W2k.

Does anybody out there have any idea what's going on and, if yes, how to fix it?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thank you even more for thinking it over
Albert.