Interesting... I've been looking at what distros I could put on the exact same machine. Tried Crunchbang, Slax, VectorLinux, Puppy 4 and 5, Xubuntu, and antiX (Thought about slackware and even debian). Was just about to test DSL and ran into the same freeze. I had crunchbang on it b/c I needed something quick w/ pptp vpn access and knew ubuntu 8.04's nm-applet worked. Went with antiX after using crunchbang for the three day's I needed VPN access and realizing it was more memory intensive than I wanted.

Try booting with "acpi=off". I managed to get to a prompt with "dsl 2 acpi=off vga=normal"

Tinycore 2.1 with Opera, flash10, XFE/XFW, xmms, OSS, and depends zooms on the 160mb
lappy, you should try it.

Also, newest browserpuppy 4.9(with flash10&firefox 3.5) also runs real fast on the Toshiba; I installed
puppy frugal style by hand, and tinycore too.
Used tinycore grub-0.97 to hook up the partition, and with both installed
in little 4gb hd, with puppy with 512mb save sfs, I still have over 1gb
free space, with a 300mb swap too.

( http://browserpuppy.com/ )

see here for my tinycore 2.1 JWM screenshots
aol radio on tinycore with OSS is LOUD too!
( http://multidistro.com/tinycore-shots/tc-scrnshots.html )