I found that whether I tried creating the image file in-place on my USB memory stick, or tried to copy the 32M file onto it from my HD, it sat there interminably trying to sync all of the information out.

I ended up creating the image file on my FAT32 HD partition, booting Windows 2K Pro, and copying the image file to the USB memory. The copy took less than a minute. Under Knoppix, I had given up on the copy after an hour.

Things seem pretty reasonable now, though shutdown time of several minutes seems to me to be excessive.