I am having another problem now. If I boot the system and don't select a boot mode at the first screen and just let it time out on "default" it boots the non-persistent mode. This is true even though the configuration file for the menu indicates that it should boot to persistent mode by default... so I'm trying to figure that out now.
you can delete all unused menu options in syslinux.cfg
+2 gusti
Yeah, that was the ticket. The configuration file I was changing was live.cfg, but that file doesn't seem to do anything. I modified the default option in syslinux.cfg and then it works as intended.