Two odd USB issues

[c0ncept]

First issue. This one just angers me every once in a while. Sometimes, when I plug a USB device into my front USB ports on my case, it will cause my monitor to just go black. The blue power light will stay on, but the screen will just stay black until I reboot. Turning the monitor on and off seems to do nothing. Another interesting point about this is that the USB plug doesn't even need to be fully plugged in to make the monitor go black. All that it needs is for the metal to touch anywhere near the USB port to cause the monitor to go black.

My second issue is not really that big of an issue, but still an annoyance. When there is a USB device plugged into my computer during bootup (normally a WD external HDD), it will usually (if not always) cause the bootup process to freeze on the motherboard display screen (I can't recall if this is before or after POST, but somewhere in this time frame). So I just get stuck looking a big GIGABYTE N-SERIES screen infinitely until I remove the USB device and try rebooting again.

Any tips or suggestions to either of these problems is welcomed.

 

[Nenu]

I have similar issues.
My Corsair 16GB memory stick makes the machine fail to get through POST, it resets the machine and POSTS again + boots fine, this time having reset my overclock.
I can demonstrate this every single time and the machine is rock stable otherwise.

When NVidia moved to the 170 series drivers (I think it was 170 series), one particular USB port - if used by anything, caused a bad issue.
With anything plugged in, boot took minutes to time out (near the end of booting) before eventually getting into Windows.
It took a lot of testing to find that it was a USB port causing the problem.
Either using a different USB port or using an older NVidia drive made it work fine.

Strange things are afoot.