front panel usb ports

Here's a strange one.... I have a couple of usb thumbdrives by Memorex. Thunder K8W, dual Opteron 246's, Suse 9.2, Lian Li case Thumbdrive(s) initially worked on front panel usb. Now I plug them in and nothing happens. No cpu activity and certainly do not get mounted. Nothing in dmesg or /proc/bus/usb/devices. I cannot manually mount them (...not a valid block device). But they do work if I use a rear port. Is it me or am I missing something?