Knoppix, Debian, slack 9.0 (i think) and i also got STD which might not be an option. along with this which file sys type? ext2, ext3, raiser FS etc.. swap file config? 1gig, 500MB etc.. what partion setup? how stable is the distro? i also have a really old red hat collecting dust some where 6.0 i believe. my PC is not not a marvel of modern tech just an old, P4, 512MB PC533 RAM, Nvidia Gforce4MX440 AGP 8X 128MB RAM, wind blows XP Service pack 3 and an 80GIG HDD (Knoppix seems to love it). i can change any of the above distributions to do what i want but which one is going to do it better with my hard ware?

Ubuntu should work out of the box on that though checking with Live Cd will not hurt. Dream Linux is also one distribution that I would suggest on it. But 512 megs is not that bad as well will run quite a lot of distributions but my take would be to avoid KDE.

It's really hard to answer these kinds of questions since so much depends on personal taste. My advice would be to try as many as possible until you find one that "speaks your language"; one that you find comfortable with and use that. For package selection and ease of use, I'd suggest a debian-based distro (debian, _buntu, Knoppix, etc. But Linux is about freedom so the choice is yours.
Cheers,
jdk

Yeah. grab some multidistro stuff,load some heavy metal and push PLAY!

urm im "old school" so you better be referring to cannibal corpse

Old School?
I'm talkin Black Sabbath, Metallica, Slayer. DIO, VoiVod.
My Tinycore-1.4.3-USB has a "musix" flavor with CreativeCommons free music inside(Metal).

Oh, Dog, If your a Metal fan you should check out Ubunut-SE-8.04
Especially the Bathory Wallpaper!
( http://ubuntusatanic.org/ )
( http://ubuntusatanic.org/wallpapers/SE-Bathory.jpg )

hmm i will give it a go but i am running windows xp only at moment how do i make Tinycore bootable on my usb?

Ubuntu satanic live CD will be done in about an hour i will try it and give feed back.

OK, first
choices-you want to leave your USB as FAT16/32 booting with syslinux or format your USB
EXT2/3 and boot with Grub?
Botting with grub you will get a nice splashscreen and booting with syslinux you will still be able to move files between the usb and windows.
I suggest you use Ubuntu livecd and use it to install grub or syslinux.

OK, I'm writing the syslinux/grub how-to for you-gotta take the "Ball-n-Chain" to work and
Yeah, your gonna use the Ubuntu cd to install syslinux or grub to usb
be right back

ubuntu live working fine the iso burnt really really clean. oh and my usb is RAW i did that with partition magic. im more familiar with Grub its old but gold. oh i am booted ubuntu now. DID NOT do RAW with part magic did it with Gparted. USB set to kill ReiserFS.

ftw

Sorry so late-are you ready or did you already hook up the usb?

got usb in can't do grub install though grub-install \dev\sdc. don't know what to do after that

Your slash is wrong. You need to do

grub-install /dev/sdc