Copy from thumb drive to external hard drive fails - "file is in use"

I have photos on a thumb drive formatted MS-DOS FAT16 from a windows machine, all are .jpg files and I'm trying to copy them to one of two partitions on an external LaCie hard drive, formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The other partition is used only for Time Machine.
With absolutely nothing else running except The Finder, when I try to directly copy them by dragging a folder of them from the thumb drive window onto the external drive window, it starts up a copy, then returns the error "Cannot complete the copy because the file "<<imagename>>.jpg" is in use. <<imagename>> is always the first item in the folder being copied.
Sharing & Permissions for the folders and all images inside are "Read & Write" privileges for (Me) (unknown) and everyone.
I can successfully drag a folder of images from the thumbdrive to my MacBook Pro (10.5.8) desktop and they copy fine. When I then try to drag the folder from the desktop to the external drive, I get the same "in use" error message.
I've used Disk Utility to repair disk permissions and repair disk on my MacBook Pro, repair disk on the thumb drive and repair disk on the external hard drive. All are fine - same error occurs.
I've ejected, turned off and disconnected all external drives and thumb drives, restarted my MBP and re-connected the drive and turned it on, and then inserted the thumb drive - same error occurs.
Help please! Am I missing something basic here? Any troubleshooting wizards out there with some other thoughts or ideas?
Thanks!

This article describes moving your music to another drive, it may be of some help: iTunes for Windows - Moving your iTunes Music Folder

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