Were all those lines in /var/log/messages from connecting the device one time or did you try connecting it multiple times? Do you have another usb device to try connecting?
Using pci=noapic shouldn't hurt anything so you might as well try it. The file you'll have to edit is called menu.lst and it should be somewhere in /boot.
In that file you'll see a line that kind of looks like this:
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz
At the end of that line add pci=noapic.