USB Thumbdrive issue

[Kevin Mulligan]

Last night I was working in Ubuntu (4.1) using OpenOffice's presentation 
program on a MS Office Powerpoint. As I went to save it, I ran into a 
very long (minute plus) wait as, I'm guessing, the file was written to 
the drive. It was very much like the program had frozen, so I went to 
another desktop panel (can't remember the correct name, sorry) and tried 
to access the drive from there (icon was on all the desktops). It opened 
the box, but acted like the other open connection to the drive -- a 
white box that was not responding. After a while, they both kicked in 
and I was able to continue.

Is this a known/discussed problem, and what can I do?

--Kevin