What was the size of the USB sitck?
Stern recommends only using 256Mb or below USB stick.
I updated a Pirates a few years back using a 512Mb stick, and the machine had no sound at all after that, then once I used a 256Mb stick, it updated and worked fine.
This would suggest their code for reading the USB stick is quite limited, which may well be the case.
Finding a 256MB stick could be a problem these days, though.