Win7 won't install in Mac mini SL w/no optical drive, crashes when accessing external HD

I've been trying to install win7 on my Mac Mini with 10.6.8 that doesn't have an optical drive. I've been able to do the bootcamp partition just fine but when it goes to restart into the windows partition with the win7 disk in the external HD, my screen goes grey, then a green with purple border and then black. I have to reboot and if I press the alt/opt key, I'm able to get into OSX again. The research I've done shows I need to create a .iso file which I did with disk utility. I created all types of .iso files, read only, compressed and dvd.cdr files. Nothing is working. Bootcamp is not recognizing any of the 5 thumb drives I've put the .iso files on as I read some drives aren't able to be recognized. The external HD works as I reinstalled SL just fine using it. My research also shows that win7 won't install from an external HD. So I'm at a a loss as to how to proceed from here. I went into my old windows machine to try to create a bootable thumb drive after I install win7 there but the Dell is so old, I don't have a DVD drive in it, only a CD drive. And if I buy a downloadable version of win7 I still need to get it to a DVD or a thumb drive to get it installed.
Does anyone have any ideas? I called Apple and their support ended at "well, we did our job by getting you to the BootCamp partition" which is a crock. It's their design to take out the optical drive and now it's everyone else's problem! Sorry, I know I've got attitude but I'm so frustrated!!
Thanks in advance! I'm posting this here and in bootcamp discussion.

Hatter helped me out without even knowing he helped me out. In cruising through the archives, he advised another problem seeker to unplug everything except 1 monitor, a mouse and a keyboard. Which I did and that solved my problems at last. I also burned my .iso file to a DVD with my MBP and it was able to be read by the external HD. So keep searching the forums peeps, your answer may be there after all!

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I have since moved the mini to work to use there and it has no issues looking up files on the time capsule which remains at home.
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The macbook whoever can only access the time capsule from within the home network. I can't seem to find what I may have done differently. Can anybody help?
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Win7 won't install in Mac mini SL w/no optical drive, crashes when accessing external HD

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