I was building a new computer with the Asus P5K motherboard.  The board is reasonably priced, and usually Asus makes good hardware, but this board is an exception.  After installing the board, and all other hardware I booted up the computer, installed  all drivers, and everything was looking good.  Later in the day I decided to add more USB ports to the computer because the motherboard had several USB headers available, and you can never have too many ports...

This is where the trouble began.  After adding a set of rear-mount USB ports (nothing plugged into them, just the ports plugged into the motherboard header), I turned the computer back on, and found that my IDE CD drives had disappeared.  Now when I say that the drives disappeared, I mean it.  They wouldn't even show up in BIOS anymore.  The light on one of them was solid orange (it usually flashes orange or green when reading/writing), and the light on the other drive was off.  I also found that neither drive would eject any more.  Keep in mind that the only thing that had changed was I plugged in the USB ports.  I double checked jumper settings for the drives, changed them from cable select to master/slave, tried a new IDE cable, but nothing worked.  Finally I unplugged the USB ports and everything worked fine again. 

I called Asus tech support, after sitting on hold for about 30 min. I talked to someone about it.  She asked several basic questions like what OS/Service pack I was running.  After answering all of the questions, she said she was pretty sure the solutions that they suggested weren't going to work.  She was then getting ready to give me a case number when I was disconnected...

I called back, waited on hold for almost another 30 min. when someone else answered.  This new woman informed me that all technical representatives were currently busy, that I could leave a message or call back on the weekend when they weren't as busy.  She told me there was nothing else she could do.

At this point I was pretty annoyed, so I called up Newegg and quickly got an RMA for the board (Just in case you don't know, Newegg is great for computer components).  I have since switched to the Intel DP35DP for the system, and everything has been working great.