Just for the record, I went back and looked at that beep code.
It will almost certainly be an AMI code, not an Award one (AMI have controlled Award for the last ten years) and it means faulty memory.
Award codes are hard to ID as they tend to be "custom" bioses for OEM manufacturers and are often tweaked. Don't trust anything written about them!
The original IBM bioses used one long + three short to indicate failed graphcis, but you won't find one of those around now (it referred to EGA graphics)
Reseating the RAM may well be all that was needed. I can't see how the USB port would have caused this error, though it would have other effects