Windows XP Gigabyte Board bizarre behavior after removing Flash Drive

I'm in hell again (this was me:http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=1350749#post1350749)

I'm praying one of you can help me.

Basics:
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3.
NVIDIA 7900GT Card
4 gigs of Samsung PC2-5300U Ram
Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 Conroe 1.86GHz

My original OS drive a WD Raptor. Everything was working good for a couple of months. I bought a new USB thumb drive, and put it into the front USB ports of the computer. When I pulled it out, the computer immediately shut down. I believe I got the "can't find NDLR" error on startup. I dealt with that once before, so I went into BIOS and changed the order of the hard drive booting back to what it was originally and it started up again fine and ran for a couple of weeks like that.

I did the same thing with the flash drive again (bad habit) a few weeks later. Same spontaneous shut down. This time, when I went back into bios, the WD Raptor drive (one of 4 in the computer) wouldn't mount with its proper title. It just said Drive 3: ZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZsZ
(or something like that). I looked it up online and heard someone say that this is a problem between the Raptor drives and some Intel chipset motherboards. I messed around with the drive but couldn't get it to mount. I put it in a USB case and got it to load on another computer.

So I figured the drive was tanked somehow. I was able to clone it to a 640 GB SATA drive. That did mount and actually worked for a few days. Then that drive started acting weird. Windows would load, but I couldn't get to the start menu (got the hourglass thing). I tried using the Windows install disk to repair the installation but that wouldn't work.

I then tried to install a clean version of windows on a different 640 GB SATA drive. I made several partitions on the drive using the installation utility from Windows. I tried to install it on the C: drive partition. Windows tried to format the partition (I erased all the old partitions on the drive). Windows tried to format the partition and then install windows but I got something like "Unable to install Windows on this partition, your drive may be damaged".

So I went back to the original 640 GB drive, and tried partitioning that, and installing Windows on the C: drive. And the same thing happened.

Thanks for reading this far.

So I'm wondering
A) Is my motherboard tanked?
b) did I somehow destroy 2 WD 640 GB drives?
c) What do I do now?
d) what's the significance of the USB drive? Is there a way in the future to make it so I can pull my USB drive out without it destroying my computer?
e) Is there something wrong with this motherboard design? Would I be better off with a different MB? I've had a kind of crappy time with it.

I can't thank you enough for the advice I've already received here and if you can figure this out, I would be absolutely grateful.

 

Update: I flashed the bios and tried installing Windows again, but no luck.

I'm wondering if the motherboard is hosed somehow?

 

It does sound a lot like a motherboard fault at the moment. Try some Ultimate Boot CD tests on the motherboard and see what happens