I was thinking of this while posting, but wasn't sure if PPI was what I was thinking it was.
As for the compile extension, I have no issue with loading it while I get my system set up....after that I can move it to optional or elsewhere and just load it manually when I want to build something new.
My main concern is with my harddrive setup. As I'd mentioned before, all of my persistent data is stored on a reiser partition. At this point I haven't looked into tc-config enough to learn whether a ppi and/or persistent home can be used on reiser unless I put the reiserfs module (currently being loaded from filesystems-2.6.26.tczm) into a remastered tinycore. I'll get to this in time, but I've just been fooling around so far.