I've read that somehow the read-only filesystem in Slax (5.1.8) can actually act as a writable fs. Well...why can't I delete a program?

I.e. Popcorn can fit on a 128, but not a lot of room left, therefore, I'm trying to delete XFCE and only use Fluxbox, TWM, or IceWM. Problem is, it goes through the motions of doing it, but when I do an "ls /var/log/packages", it is still there. How is this done?

Although you *may* get suggestions here, the similarities between Slackware and Slax are few and far between. In addition, this specific problem has literally nothing to do with Slackware, so this forum may not be the best help. You should probably read some of the documentation on the SLAX site, and if you can't find anything post in their forums if you want more help.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by saying Slax and Slackware are not related/have similarities. Slax is based on Slackware. Give that, and the obvious link between Slackware and good, hardcore Linux users, I figured this would be the place to post.

Evidently it has not however, drawn much attention.

Technically SuSE is based on Slackware too -- and I don't think you'd find ANY similarities there.
Loosely based. It uses a lot of Slax-specific things to produce the functional LiveCD setup, it uses some strange modularized setup, etc. They are very, very different. Just because they start out the same doesn't mean they end up the same. I'm not sure about the current version of Slax, but in the past the kernel versions weren't even the same, leading to totally different hardware detection. Before 12.0 was released and 11.0 was still going strong, Slax was using a 2.6 kernel -- COMPLETELY different than the 2.4-based 11.0. Everything was different. In addition, even just using Slax feels different than using Slackware. They're not the same.
That is unfortunate, but expected, I think. The users here are not experienced with Slax, they're experienced with Slackware. The problem is, in Slackware, the solution to your problem would be as simple as
However, this will definitely not work in Slax because the layout is totally different. In Slackware, the root partition is already writable by default. In Slax, it's different. It has some UnionFS stuff for the LiveCD, and I don't know anything about using Slax on a USB drive. It's totally different than Slackware in every imaginable way, hence the low response here. I would again urge you to post in their forums if you haven't already for a better response. Alternatively, you could try posting in a General forum here at LQ -- but I think the feedback will be similar to this thread, unfortunately.

Firstly, like what t3slider have said, this may not be the best place to ask this. Slax forum is quite active and you might find the best solution there.

From my limited knowledge on Slax (and on Linux in general ), you add/remove 'things' from Slax-module point of view rather than Slackware package point of view. I'm not sure about version 5.1.8, but in the newer ones (6.0.x), if I want to remove something, I'd simply delete the module (i.e. the lzm file) from the slax module directory and rebuild the iso. As in Slackware, since you're talking about 'core' modules, you'd want to double check if what you're taking out won't break anything in the live environment. If you need more specific removal (I think you might be thinking of this), you can uncompress the module to a directory (lzm2dir), do the modification and recompress.

That's only my personal opinion on what you can try - you might want to check out with the guys at Slax forum. They are quite helpful.