Security/Recovery Distro for USB
 

I am wanting to use linux on a USB drive. My aim for this distro is for security and recovery for learning and productive purposes and I'd also like to be able to do general, general computing (i.e. internet, word processing, etc). I'm interested in Puppy, Trinity, BackTrack, and SystemRescueCD, but they all seem to offer their own thing. I've seen where people just conclude to settle for more than one, but I'd like to just find the ultimate one to put on my drive. Thank you for your help.

...and that's what IMHO the problem is. You see, these specialist distro's cater to those who need a large set of tools for a specific job. For instance when I'm using HELIX I want to dd.* (or 'linen') the heck out of things as fast as I can and I do not expect (or would ever hope to find) a complete office, photo editing and database suite installed on it. So if you would use only say pyFLAG from one and Metasploit from the other, wouldn't it be easier to use a "mainstream" distro and just add those tools?

That's a good point. I didn't think about adding the programs I wanted. I thought about getting a distro and then install OpenOffice and a browser but I didn't think about doing it the other way around. I guess that way the distro would definitely work for general computing. The only thing is would I need to add extra things to do the distro besides the application? For example, if I wanted an application that could recover files on a Windows partition, would I need other tools besides the one application to do this? Because of this, I thought I might be better to get a distrabution that could perform these actions. Also, would it be that hard to add OpenOffice and a browser to a security/recover distro this those are the only two things I'd want/ need?

There's a distro better than all you mentioned-
( http://grml.org/ )
Here's the latest FULL iso (674MB)
( http://mirror.rit.edu/grml/grml_2008.11.iso )
This distro has many more tools than most "Rescue/Security" distro's-yet it is not well known-it can run live, install to HD/USB, and you can add software to it-either by adding the software to the "small" iso or when installed to USB/HD.
Check it out!