@ryanvade:

You forgot to write which version of Knoppix you were trying.

It is possible to start Knoppix 7.0.3 CD with qemu on an Windows host using 256 MB RAM for the virtual machine. Knoppix 7.0.3 uses RAM compression that should help on machines with little RAM installed. If possible, one should create a suitable swap partition on an HDD and enable it. (I don't think that it would be a good idea to use a flash device for swapping since the lifetime of flash memory is very limited regarding write operations.)