Good move editing the subject line, it started out quite lame.

1) Some think writing to NTFS is safe. Others including myself are not convinced of this yet. My suggestion is that there is no reason to do this if it puts all of your data at risk, avoid doing it. Installing Knoppix to hard disk will not change this and is not recommended.

2) There used to be a package list for both the CD and DVD on the mirrors, but the last time that I looked there was not one for the DVD. There generally is a packages.txt file that comes with a BitTorrent download. I still have the one from my CD download, but burnt my DVD iso and needed the space, so I deleted the 5.1.1 download directory. If you used BitTorrent to download and there wasn't one included with the download then I guess one was never made for 5.1.1. You might try looking at a package list for an older DVD, I doubt that much changed.

3) Yes, but unfortunately for those who try to install it, it is based on a mix of Debian version, and doesn't apt-get update well.

4) Yup, sure are. Look through the news section of this forum for some suggestions.

5) Because of the mixed version issue mentioned above, installing software doesn't always work. And large packages may exceed the limits of the ram disk. You can try to install software, are you feeling lucky? There is also Klik, an effort to address this issue. See the Klik forum for details. Some other Live CDs have somewhat better support for this, see DSL and Puppy Linux for examples. And you stress that the question pertains to running oin Live CD mode, but don't think that it will be beter if you install Knoppix to disk. If you want an installed Debian system, install Debian.