Booting from USB flash: working with knoppix26 for anyone?

I've been having fun booting Knoppix off a 1Gb USB flash drive formatted as FAT16 using some of the helpful instructions scattered through the forums on booting with syslinux. It will boot quite happily with knoppix24. It boots but fails to find the root filesystem on the USB drive when using knoppix26.

I've tried various permutations of module loading and scanning in linuxrc to see if it was a timing problem, without any success. Any advice would be welcome :)

A second related question: I can't persuade the flash drive to boot when I include a
second partition to use as a persistent home. If anyone has a similar setup working
I'd be interested to hear how it was done.