troublesome arduino uno?

[zerogauge]

Intel Core-i5-2600K cpu
MSI P67A-GD65 motherboard
8gb DDR3-1333
90gb ssd
2x 640gb raid0
Geforce GTX 480 super oc
killer nic
windows 7 premium
arduino uno from recencly purchased starter pack
Arduino alpha 0022 software

I first started my journey on Tuesday evening. I put the prototype shield together and was doing tutorials 1-3. The entire time I kept having problems with uploading to the Arduino. I could only upload a sketch once, upon trying a second time it would hang on Uploading to I/O Board...
I would have to unplug and replug the usb cable into the Arduino to get the software to see the com port again and then be able to upload.

Well tonight (Thursday night) I'm on tutorial 5 and when I attempted to load the iffy sketch, it said "Done uploading." and in the black box below it said...
Binary sketch size: 1034 bytes (of a 32256 byte maximum)
avrdude: ser_send(): write error: sorry no info avail

I keep getting that on every sketch I try to upload now. I've tried assigning different COM ports to the Arduino in Device manager (it's currently set for COM7, up from COM3)

Unsure what to try at this point. Nothing useful found in google for that ser_send error.

Thanks.

[adafruit_support_bill]

Sounds like a shakey connection. Try a different USB cable.