Having got the cloud mode working the next step was to modify the now failing persistent stanza to incorporate the iso= bootcode. This has been successfully done but generates an anomaly described below.
The USB flash drive has a second partition (ext2) which contains /home, /opt, /tce. To avoid any configuration conflicts the entire contents including dot-directories and dot-files of /home/tc were first moved out to different location. The machine was booted using the cloud stanza described previouly and the contents of the volatile /home/tc were copied to the empty persistent /home/tc.
The machine successfully boots the ISO directly via GRUB4DOS using:
title Tinycore Desktop (Mount Mode, Persistent Apps, /home, /opt)
root ()
map /tinycore-4.5.3.iso (hd32)
map --hook
root (hd32)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz quiet vga=788 norestore waitusb=10:UUID=231A-905B iso=UUID=231A-905B/TinyCore-4.5.3.iso tce=UUID=59e7163f-df2c-49bb-8fdd-84a938bba5fe home=UUID=59e7163f-df2c-49bb-8fdd-84a938bba5fe opt=UUID=59e7163f-df2c-49bb-8fdd-84a938bba5fe
initrd /boot/core.gz
Both the file system label (DATAZONE) or sdb2 are also usable.
ANOMALY
Using the above stanza both the wbar and right-click-on-desktop-->System Tools are correctly populated.
Appending an additional boot code, desktop=jwm, the wbar remains fully populated however, the right-click-on-desktop-->System Tools is completely empty.