I have my persistent home area working just fine now, along with my persistent config file. I have some other questions, but I'll post that in a new thread.

Re powering off... Knoppix is very weird about this. I log out of Knoppix, and it shuts down the OS but not the computer. I have to hold down the power button for 10 seconds to manually turn it off. Then about five minutes later, the computer spontaneously turns itself on again. It is EXTREMELY annoying. What's with this??

Also, how come Knoppix doesn't have a restart option? You have to actually power off to log on again.