I doubt it's the BIOS because it finds the drive and boots from it. Once the OS starts to come up the config doesn't load. It's almost like something has bound the last port the USB stick was plugged into.
The GUI is unaccessible but the NIC pings. When I pull up the CLI over IPMI, the hostname is "Tower" and not what I defined.
If I move the stick back to the last slot it was in and reboot, it boots just fine.