Admittedly, I've only skimmed this thread and I've not analyzed every word, but for those who are trying to make USB devices boot a PC,
I've been doing it for some time now, with the little program from HP that can set up a USB device to boot a PC.
 
Of course, your Bios has to co-operate with this attempt.
I've found, however, that most new motherboards do support booting from USB devices.   Even my seven year old Asrock board does.

I use the HP program to take the boot files off of my Ghost boot floppy and put them on the USB drive, like a Flash Drive.
Then I just copy the rest of the Ghost files from the floppy to the flash drive and VIOLA, I have a flash drive that's an exact copy of my Ghost boot floppy.

Then with all the extra space on the Flash Drive, I can add other helpful Utilities like NTFS4DOS and all my hard drive utilities.

Once I've got everything set up on the flash drive, I can use Nero to burn it all to a CD.

It all works beautifully!!

Good Luck!

The Shadow