Great - just tried to send a post, and NoScript murdered it (it was taking ages to go - and NoScript thought it had found a XSS attack - always happens if I try to sign in from one of the really slow old computers, too.)

Scylla, just a thought - perhaps you could try a different flash drive, in case there's some sort of a problem with the present one's boot sector or something.

Additionally, it might be worth trying a different distro. One of the Ubuntu variants would stand a good chance of success - Mint remains my favourite.

I'd be inclined to download the iso to your computer's hard drive, rather than letting Unetbootin do it - I installed Unetbootin to this machine's Windows 2000 partition, and it took eighty minutes to download Puppy. Even for my connection, that's bad - I would expect to be most of the way through a much larger distro in that time.

When you come to use Unetbootin to produce the live flash drive, it's easy to point it to the stored iso.

So - a different distro and a different flash drive could just achieve the desired effect.

Good luck, anyway. It can be an infuriating pursuit, but also a very rewarding one.