Are brown and white CPU fan connectors interchangable?

I tried to put a fan with a brown connector (MB has a white male connector) on a P4-2.8 socket 478 system yesterday (just to see if I had enough parts to make another system), and the fan would spin for a sec and then stop (not binding up) on poweron. It did it a couple of more times and then shut-itself down due to 'cpu fan failure'. I put a white Asus HS and fan on the same setup and it worked fine.

What is the difference between the brown and white connectors? Both are 3 pin.