USB flash drive - close encounter with success

[Sage]

On the basis that persistence sometimes pays off, tried again to load and boot v3.01 from an incredibly perverse flash stick. Installation, as usual, was uneventful. It refused to boot on any AMD HW. Set one P4/2G machine to boot from USB-HDD and, guess what?!
However, isn't there always an 'however'? Two, in this case.
Booting was exceptionally slow. So slow as to be worthless. No BIOS tweaking or other HW messing improved this.
The almost good news was that 640x480x16 VESA almost gave me a picture. But didn't. Nor did any other VESA nor XOrg mode work. This is utterly ridiculous because almost all available modes work from CD and the machine presently has a FULL install of 2.14 running with no issues.
Not asking for suggestions on the HW/FW side - probably tried them all. Any comments about the SW/OS would be of interest, though.
This mode of OS booting remains too hit-and-miss to have any value, especially as I try to avoid Intel machines, even as gifts. To be truly portable, it would need to guarantee bootability on ANY machine. At home, frankly, I have no problems getting any of my several dozen machines started with ANY OS.