Weird, but maybe i missed something.

Your trying to boot a knoppix 3.3 cd and you get a previously saved desktop, right? Not a reinstall to hd? No usb stick, floppy plugged in? No rewritable cd in the other cd drive?

The brute force method: open up the box, pull the ide cables off of all the drives except the cd holding knoppix and boot. If that desktop still shows up you somehow remastered the 3.3 - congratulations but it beats me!

Perhaps more elegant: when the thing finishes booting, open a root shell and type: dmesg| grep config ( i am guessing you've done that ). The output should tell that it's found the config somewhere whilst booting.

Finally, the version of xp on one of my boxes has two windows partitions, the first holding backup info (its a hp specific thing i guess, don't know) and the second xp itself. When i have saved knoppix config, it ends up on the first partition, which is fat32. I can't remeber whether i put it there by choice or by default.

Hope this helps