First I have to say thanks.
TCE totally hit the spot as for what I am looking for! Learning the TCB nuances did take some time. The only thing I could suggest is a warning for shutdown/reboot that compares the saved filelist against the current filesystem and either automatically backs it up or prompts. I've lost some stuff because I rebooted without saving. Maybe even have the extensions inject their own entries into filelist?
But now onto my question...
I recently saw
http://www.embedded-bits.co.uk/2011/1-second-linux-boot-to-qt/ and I was wondering if the same techniques could be applied to TCB. It already is fast - my BIOS is the slowest single part. (BIOS, boot into X, start X app) But this still takes about a minute.
Thanks again for a totally awesome distro!