@John
Is there any way you can boot another vmlinuz/initrd to your usual one? i.e. do you have grub4dos or a PXE server that you can net boot from?
Assuming you can then download the vmlinuz and initrd.lzo from here
http://tinyurl.com/ngf6snn and boot using those i.e. grub menu entry something like
title Puppy 533t
root (hd0,2)
kernel /Puppy_533t/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd pfix=ram
initrd /Puppy_533t//initrd.lzo
you may (probably) have to change the (hd0,2) to something else - typically the first number is the drive number and the second is the partition in that drive, counting from zero i.e. mine is /mnt/sda3 so sda = first hard drive so number = 0, and third partition so second number is 2.
The initrd.lzo is similar to initrd.gz that are more commonly used, but it used LZO compression instead of gzip compression. The initrd.lzo is also big (around 180MB) as it also contains puppy sfs internally to that.
If you can boot that - just select the VESA option during the boot process, then connect to the net by clicking the network tray icon and then open /root/my-applications and in that directory there's a get-latest-firefox script that will ... surprise surprise download the latest firefox. Once that's downloaded open something like /root/my-applications/Firefoxnnnn/opt/program/firefox sub directory and click on firefox to run the browser and revisit the URL again and grab the biggy (500MB) officelzop1.sfs file. Once that's downloaded right click and sfs load it and that will include skype4.3 (together with Libre office, Audacity, Open Shot, Blender, xvidcap, flash Qt and full blown inkscape. Python is also wrapped up into that lot as well).
I find that running vesa is fine as that puppy also includes mesa so the graphics speed/quality is generally acceptable enough not to need having to install a specific graphics card driver, excepting if you're doing some high power graphics stuff.
That Slacko 533t based puppy has the Slacko 5.7 kernel, so it supports recent hardware. The normal puppy menu has been relegated to a right click of the desktop. Avoid the main menu as it takes some other installation activity to get that working correctly i.e. use the right click desktop menu to start up skype etc, not the normal main menu button.
All this assumes you have 1GB+ ram and 1.2GB of disk space+