compatible USB sticks for booting?

I've been experimenting with booting various things from USB on my Linpus Linux Lite AAO. I've just observed that some sticks don't seem to work with booting. It just freezes on a black screen with a cursor flashing in the top-left corner. Other sticks seem to work just fine. I'll be doing a bit more testing with this, but just wanted to see if anyone else is having this experience or if it's just me?

For the record:
the ones that worked for me > Sandisk Cruzer Micro with U3 (formatted so it doesn't have the u3 partition) - 4gb and 8gb
the one that didn't work > RetailPlus+ 8GB

 

I've had similar hassles; 3 sticks and four different machines (a ThinkpadG40, 7year old home-built desktop, 2 aspire One's :

Sandisk Cruzer Micro 8Gb (u3 exterminated from it); Will only boot the Thinkpad.
5 year old old generic 256Mb cheap stick; boots my Thinkpad and Desktop.
Kingston DataTraveller 8Gb (twice the cost of the Cruzer!) boots everything perfectly.

From my experience, and what I have seen, it seems that it's a bit hit-n-miss with the cheap sticks, but spending some dosh buys more certainty, it's not helped by the AOne being quite fussy. The high-end kingston sticks seem rock-solid, however.

With the Cruzer on my original AOne, it would normally fail as you describe, but occasionally started the boot sequence and then crapped out at some (random!) point later on. I spent some time playing with this but never had a successful boot.