In which I rant about Gigabyte support and then beg for suggestions

[struggle4progress]

Bought a Gigabyte mobo. Had good luck in the past. But can't get this one to boot off a usb stick. Tried various linux distros on thumb drives known to boot on other machines I have. No luck

Finally contact Gigabyte support and explain I've tried different distros, different thumb drives, different BIOS settings, different boot time options -- all no dice. Week goes by. Finally Gigabyte support answers my ticket with generic blah blah: Are you sure you have bootable media? Did you try setting boot order in the BIOS?

Yeah, well, I just had told them all that. Grr! So I wait until I don't feel like strangling them, then I spend some more time testing. All usb slots work. I take four different brand thumb drives with three different distros and check all four thumb drives with the installed distros on a different AMD-socket mobo and on a different Intel-socket mobo; all four boot on both those machines. Then I try these four drives with the installed distros in various different usb ports and with different boot options (usb-hdd, usb-cdrom, usb-fdd, usb-zip) of the Gigabyte mobo: nothing works

So I go back and give Gigabyte support this more detailed info. And Gigabyte replies with some vague garbage along the lines of: Did you install using a Windows OS? The which I don't know what the fug they mean by

So then it's a game of trying to prepare a bootable thumb drive inside Windows: boot up a Windows 7 system, download unetbootin and lili to it, grab a few more thumb drives and format them FAT32 using Windows 7, then trying installing some OS on a thumb drive using unetbootin or lili or somesuch. The kicker being that the Windows version of unetbootin doesn't seem to work for shizz in Windows 7: I've tried three preps so far and have yet to get a bootable usb flash that way. Lili might or might not work: it depends. After six attempts, I've got only one flashdrive (CrunchBang), prepared in a Windows 7 environment, that'll boot on my test AMD-socket and Intel-socket mobos, which sometime tomorrow I'll try exhaustively on the new Gigabyte mobo -- and, of course, I'm not feelin so very optimistic here

So now I come crawlin, beggin for suggestions:

(1) Any other good programs to put live cds on flash drives?
(2) Any suggestions for a dos-based live cd I could use for a different test?
(3) Should I be worrying about which usb port I'm trying to boot from?

[struggle4progress]

1. OK, Crunchbang installed via lili-usb-creator (running in Windows 7) produced a flashdrive

bootable on this Gigabyte board -- not that I have any clue why