Posting a follow up in case anyone finds this thread relevant at some point.
One problem was that I had a SATA disk in the system which had grub installed from a previous life, and the bios changed boot devices in a manner I did not expect - this was the "grub>" prompt I kept getting. I also had the bios force the USB stick to appear as a non-removable device during one attempted install, which caused the kernel panic with error 19 (no such device?). In short: 2009.06 works fine on the stick. The workaround to bug 4755 likely does as well, though I haven't tried. jkeil - Thanks for your time and advice. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
