[CentOS] USB flash drive stopped working properly....

This past Tuesday (2/22/07) my flash drive started acting really strange - it only worked intermittently and would disappear right after an access or two. Yesterday it stopped working altogether - I couldn't even access it through my WinXP-on-VMWare. I rebooted my machine, and it worked fine after that.

Is there some time limit on how long a USB flash drive will work in CentOS or is this a bug or ? ? ?

I'm running a Dell Precision 390 with a Pentium-4 HT 3GHz, 2Gb mem, 1 SATA 150Gb (?) drive, multiple USB ports (including KB&mouse), etc., using CentOS 4.4 with the 2.6.9-42.0.8 kernel.

The flash drive is a 2Gb SanDisk Titanium Cruzer-mini.

Thanks.