I'm in a little bit of a rush right now, but I hope also post a message with the boot process and messages you should see at each stage.

jbreiden, you're right, I don't think FAT32 vs FAT16 should matter, but ...

I sounds to me since you've been able to boot DSL off your stick, that
you're not even getting SYSLINUX to go yet. Are you getting any msgs
to indicate the boot process from your stick has started?

You should be able to (I think) to take a freshly formatted stick and
run syslinux against it, attempt to boot and see the "Syslinux 2.11..."
message. If you can get that, you're headed in the right direction....
Try FAT16 (type 6 in fdisk), just for kicks.

I don't expect to have net access while I'm gone, but if I do, I'll check back.

Mike