USB hard drives/thumb drives to work

I just recently built a new system running an Intel Q9550 quad core 8 GB of ram and Vista Home Premium x64. Everything works flawlessly except for connecting external hard drives and thumb drives through the usb port. I've tried multiple hard drives/thumb drives on multiple ports on the front and back with it working only once for the thumb drive. Usually Vista keeps sounding the device connect and device disconnect dongs for a few minutes and then every once in a while says the drive needs to be formatted, but the drives work fine on my Laptop that's running Vista Home Premium 32-bit. Is this a common problem with x64 or is there something wrong with my system?

thanx

when I hook the usb thumb drive to the usb port on my printer, Vista recognizes it and lets me see the files on the drive, it also lets me copy a file to it but then freezes after it finishes copying (the copy window has a full progress bar and say "about 0 seconds remaining".

I'd say to do the following:

1. Check your bios for settings related to USB e.g. USB speed (Full Speed/High Speed), and change them , try, then change them back etc...
2. Install the latest Chipset INF utility for your motherboard from your motherboard's manufacturer downloads section.
3. Check your internal connections on the motherboard. You might have misplaced the USB front connectors.

And try removing half your RAM and seeing if that is an issue - some mobos are having major issues when using 4 sticks of RAM as opposed to 2 (be sure to remove two that don't affect DDR, btw).