I once had a (somewhat) similar wyse S30 thin client running with tinycore 2.x (also Geode, CS5536 chipset), there are special ATA, clock and sound driver modules for these devices, which may not be integrated into tinycore (I didn't use the builtin flash but PXE because it wasn't writable). PXE booting was in normal speed, but e.g. CONFIG_PATA_CS5536 is not set in tc kernel, it might be timeout related?