Took Zenwalk out, trying to install Arch on EeePC 901

I recently installed Zenwalk on my netbook after several completely abortive attempts to get FreeBSD working.
Well, Zenwalk worked "OK" but perhaps I made a mistake with the Kiba-Dock I installed there. It never really worked that well, tending to be super bouncy and with an astonishing tendency to revise its position on the screen.
The killer blow however was that the upper and lower panels both disappeared irretrievably after about a week of use on BOTH occasions that I installed Zenwalk 6.0. This severely hampered Zenwalks usefulness.
It was, when it worked correctly, fast and could be very suitable for netbooks. However, its habit of dismembering itself after just a short time really was the last straw. So, out with Zenwalk and in with Arch Linux.
Unfortunately, Arch is providing quite a few install problems. I initially tried the latest USB core image from here and used the dd method explained at the top of this page.
Although, the install went fine in every case (at least 10) that I tried this, the kernel was nearly always (from uname -r) 2.6.28.7 rather than the expected 2.6.30-ARCH. The fact that Arch calls ALL of its boot files either vmlinuz26 or kernel26.img irrespective of which actual linux kernel is involved makes diagnosis difficult.
On one occasion, however, I did manage to get the 2.6.30-ARCH kernel installed but, amazingly, this seemed to degrade itself after a few hours of use to 2.6.28.7. This really is extremely difficult to understand. I posted to the Arch forum on this where a little more info is available.
I later tried to make a LiveUSB from the 2009-08.core.iso and Unetbootin, but although the LiveUSB formed without problem, I just couldn't get it to boot.
There are some threads that cover similar problems but none of the solutions worked for me.
Now I'm going to dig deeper into the voluminous Arch wiki literature such as the Beginner's Install Guide and a special section for the EeePC 901.