Oh, and I said 'try Ubuntu or Puppu Linux', but coming from Windows, I would recommend Xubuntu, which is based on Ubuntu, but with Xfce, which is a desktop environment that's lightweigt and easy to use.

Get it here: xubuntu.org

Then get the Linux usb installer for Windows, which is easy to use.
Get it here: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

So you just get the Xubuntu ISO, install Universal USB Installer, and just install the iso to your usb drive.

So, if you choose Puppy instead, to run the OS from only your usb drive (as it allows you to save the changes you make to your install), the procedure is the same.

The problem in this case with Puppy, is that its default file-manager doesnt recognize exe files, and runs them with Wine once installed. I think this is the case, so use the package manager to get SpaceFM or Thunar or any other file manager you can find.
Oh, and Puppy will probably be lackingnyour graphics drivers. But they are easy to install.

The games, I know; the computers, I don't know.

Though there was a time when you had to set the refresh rate and resolution for your monitor, or the old crt monitors could overheat, or otherwise go bad. In the early days of Linux, which I've only heard about.

At least it's not as complicated as that anymore ^^

I'd recommend about 2-4gb. But in Puppy Linux I got by with 512mb storage/persistence files, and in Puppy you don't have to worry about exceeding it, as it has a program to grow it.
And you can also get a lot of programs in .sfs (squashfs) files, which are mounted to the root file-system. In other words extensions.

Anyways, if you want to use Xubuntu on a usb drive at all times instead of creating an ext4 partition, you will need 3-4gb. Probably. But even if you don't find some program to extend it with, you can create a new ext4 file-system in a file, mount it, set permissions so your user can write to it, and just copy the files from the old persistence file over.

So perhaps just start with a 2gb file, and partition your drive from inside Xubuntu with GParted (just keep your Windows C drive intact), and run the install choosing the partition you made. This way things will load faster as well, especially if you've got an SSD. But Linux requires an EXT, XFS or other Unix file-system for its root partition. Which it can of course get on a VFAT fs as well, if it mounts the file-system file.

Though getting a live Linux distro on a usb drive is simple enough, and requires no knowledge about Linux, it would be good to know quite a bit more.

My motherboard made it a bit convoluted to boot to USB. It allows the user to choose one optical drive, one USB device, and one hard drive to boot from, but it includes USB sticks in with hard drives. I'll have to tinker with the BIOS settings every time I want to switch between Windows and Linux.

(I also needed to plug in a wired keyboard to access the BIOS.)

(If I make a habit of this I'll want to get a 16-32gig SD card. That would be classified as a USB device by my motherboard.)

I see what you meant when you talked about USB drives being slow. I would have expected them to act like a SSD, but apparently they lack the controllers of the latter. I'm guessing that a SD card might be even slower.

sudo apt-get install wine

Repositories are one of the big advantages of Linux over Win. If you need a program, there are chances that it will be in the repos. If so, you can just invoke a clever program which will automagically do everything needed. You can just watch and/or go make yourself a coffee.

Anyway, this is what you do on a normal Linux computer. I don't really know how did the tool you used set up the persistent storage, but I'd bet it will be hard or impossible to make the installation persistent. Certainly there is some voodoo which can be done in order to alleviate the nuisance of installing all the packages into RAM every time you boot the system up, but I doubt it can be done away with completely.

And every time I run Xubuntu it resets my computer's clock to GMT. :-/

So get the official Puppy Linux distro at puppylinux.org

Yes, it appears that a Puppy Linux distro would work best on a live USB stick. I've done a bit of research and found that Simplicity Linux comes with Wine built in -- a big plus for our audience. Simplicity's weaknesses wouldn't seem to be a problem for our purpose.

On about my 5th boot it failed to launch the desktop and black-screened. It's supposed to revert to a setup screen on my next reboot but it doesn't. It looks like I can get to a command line with a 'nox' argument but I'm not sure what to do once I get there.

As for the black-screen — it is practically impossible to give an advice, because I'm not really sure whether I would be able to do anything with it even when I had physical access to the computer; leave alone doing this kind of diagnosis at a distance.

But since you are speaking about arguments ... could you tell me the boot parameters? (I believe you have already found how to get them.) The first reasonable thing would be to delete the "quiet" parameter, if present (and it is present for 99% of the time, since if it isn't specified, your terminals are flooded with lots of kernel diagnostics). Maybe you can get some useful insight into what's going on.

As for the wine: the simplest way of checking whether something is installed is just trying to use it, so I'd recommend firing up a terminal and trying

wine --version

which wine

If it turns out that there is truly a wine installed, then you may try to move yourself into a directory which contains an EXE file (exactly like in DOS, there is a

cd

cd a/b

wine (filename)

My Lenovo motherboard is much more flexible. As long as I specify that I want the system to be able to boot to a 'USB Drive' then it can boot to it either automatically or manually.

This creates a ramdisk in your home directory, and authorizes you on it. Must be run in a terminal, as you need to authorize yourself, as sudo (super-user do/act) is used, to give the user temporary super-user permissions.

You could also add amsimple cpmcommand to the create_ramdisk script, to copy stuff you want to have in it at every boot-up. Anyways, I was just exposing an interesting feature here, not some necessity for running Lonux.

I can't really help you with this one because whenever I made myself a bootable Linux USB drive, I meant to install the system on one of my computers once and for good. However, if something in Wine or DOSbox weren't going your way, I can lend a hand.

That being said, Wine is now really good at running Win things and most of them run straight out of the box, without needing to resort to obscure settings and hacks.