OK, I'm about to bash my brains out trying to figure this out

I have a Pentium MMX 200 built on top of a Matsonic rebrand of the PCChips M547 running Windows 98 FE with 64MB of RAM.

I cannot get the USB bus to work correctly with USB mass storage devices. It will copy 30-50MB either way then throw a "cant access device" or "file not found/cannot be read" error depending on the direction of the transfer.

Is this a known issue with the Apollo VPX/97 chipset? I know VIA chipsets are generally not well regarded. I tried installing the Via 4-in-1 driver but that just bricked the OS (made Rundll32 start throwing illegal operations and access violations @ the desktop, and Windows to stop booting after a couple of reboots). I'm running the Sandisk Cruzer W95 USB driver.

I've tried the obvious (switching USB ports, a different USB drive, etc)