That's odd-- I use it a lot and don't have issues unless the flash drive has issues. At any rate, the solution (in this case) was the onboard graphics causing the grief. I ended up using an old graphics card and that fixed it.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll post my issues link from the Mint forums. Really hoping to solve this asap as medical issues are also looming.
Basically, everything went perfectly until launching firewall froze things. I didn't bother worrying and took the tower back to the owner where it...