I have some stone age experience with this problem using a USB ZIP 100. The problem occurred most of the time when there many parallel writes to to either the ZIP alone or the ZIP and an internal IDE disk. My solution at that was to avoid this kind of situation.

Furthermore a quick google shows that you're certainly not the only one with this or a similar problem. Apparently the USB implementation is not 100% in Linux. I guess you will finally find you're answer there, however then there is ofcourse still the problem of getting the right stuff on your ASUS box

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...09.3/1215.html

and one with a USB 2.0 device connected to USB 1.1 port

http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/9/29/46

and the experts are overhere I guess

http://www.spinics.net/lists/usb/threads.html