I have used a few Live distros recently - Knoppix, Mepis, and Ubuntu - and am impressed by how well they work on my 1.4gig desktop with 1 gig of ram. Right off the CD, no muss or fuss, they all have more strengths than weaknesses. My question is that I have a number of older early pentium 1 and 2 machines that bog down under these distros. Are there any versions of Knoppix or similar distros that would work on what could best be described as "solid Windows 98" machines?

For example:

Pentium I, 128mhz, 91meg Ram laptop. I have used this machine as a Win95-Me machine for almost 8 years. It will load Word97 without any problems and can do basic web surfing with IE. However, Knoppix 3, while it will load with some graphics tweaking, is almost unreadable and OpenOffice can't load.

and: (welcome to my museum of antiques)

Pentium II, 233, 65meg desktop. Part of my network, runs all the above quite well and I use it for a quake 2 game server. Recently, I reformatted and put on Mandrake 7.2, reconsidered and moved to RedHat 9.0. However, this machine too has problems with Knoppix and Mepis.

Any ideas? I am looking for a "light" version, not in terms of space, but in terms of overhead. Need the following:
Ability to run Firefox. OpenOffice 1+, and have basic networking built in.