Thanks for persevering, dice. I gave up too soon. I did an install with targeted drivers and the initrd was only 8M, but maybe because the hardware was virtual. Let's see how this turns out, but I think you may have solved it.

24M is big, and you confirmed that you didn't select for targeted drivers only. So that means your problem is not the same as dice's.

I think I found it. Move /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/driver-policy out of the way and run update-initramfs -u and then make a new snapshot.

Yeah, the second way is correct. I should have explained the quotes and $. Replace that with path to the file you're checking. And it looks good. The script removed crypttab and resume as it should have. I don't know what the next step is.

Please do the same on either the mounted iso or mounted usb stick that has the image. Check /live/initrd.img to see if resume and crypttab got removed. Is the host system that made this snapshot an encrypted system?

lsinitramfs "$initrd.img" | egrep "resume|cryptroot|crypttab|askpass"

Note: in the previous post I started the command with '#' which suggests it needs to be run as root, but that is not the case. You can run the command as user.

I don't understand the symlinks at all. When you looked at the mounted usb with ls, it showed the right things.

You can mount the iso as root and look at it that way.

mount /home/snapshot/snapshot.iso /mnt
ls /mnt
ls /mnt/live
ls /mnt/isolinux
# and when you're done looking around in there
umount /mnt

You should see /live /isolinux /pkglist_whatever. Look inside /live and you should see initrd.img vmlinuz and filesystem.squashfs. Inside /isolinux should be live.cfg (the boot menu) and a bunch of other files that are the same ones in /usr/lib/refractasnapshot/iso/isolinux/.

Edit: you could do the same with the mounted usb and look inside the directories.

ls /media/computerbob/liveiso/live    # and so on.

Let's see what's in these two resume files. I don't understand why there are both of them. The first one is in older releases and then the name was changed to the second one in ascii or beowulf.

conf/conf.d/resume
conf/conf.d/zz-resume-auto

In order to get to those files, initrd.img needs to be extracted. Here are the commands to do that. Do this as unprivileged user in your home directory.

cp /initrd.img /home/computerbob/
mkdir extracted
cd extracted
(cpio -i ; zcat | cpio -i) < ../initrd.img

Then look in extracted/conf/conf.d/resume and zz-resume-auto
One or both will probably have the uuid of your swap partition. One or both might have RESUME=none. Or maybe something else I haven't thought of.

Don't delete the extracted stuff. It might be possible to fix and repack the initrd and plug it into the build process.

Multiple desktop environments doesn't work as easily as it used to. There are more dependency conflicts. You might have an easier time if you avoid metapackages. Instead of task-xfce-desktop or any of the others that get installed from the installation isos, install xfce4 or even install the individual parts. Same goes for the other desktops. That way you can resolve conflicts individually as they come up. Also, installing without Recommends will help with this.

If you just want to test different desktops, it might be cleaner to test in a virtual machine.

Default applications in the system are controlled by the alternatives system. Generally, the last app of any particular type that gets installed is the one that is preferred.  See man update-alternatives and ls -l /etc/alternatives/ for more information.

n-m vs. wicd: In this case, it's the desktop environments that pulled them in. You could probably avoid this by installing things in pieces as described above.

I tried dice's qemu command (without the sudo) and my iso boots as cdrom or as disk. I'm pretty sure the problem is in the initramfs.

dice, please run:

lsinitramfs /initrd.img | egrep "resume|cryptroot|crypttab|askpass"

file -L /initrd.img

Perfect!!!

Here's the fix.
1. Make a backup copy of /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
    If you don't ever hibernate your computer, this step is not really necessary.
2. As root, edit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume so that it contains only the following:
   RESUME=none
   Save the file.
3. Run update-initramfs -u
4. Make a new snapshot.

5. (Optional) If you do use hibernate, you need to undo what you did. Copy the original resume file back to where it was and run 'update-initramfs -u' again. If you do that, you'll have to do this whole procedure every time you want to make a snapshot.

I don't see anything helpful in the log. It all looks good. Are there any messages above the boot error other than the ones you posted?

Mount the usb and run

lsinitramfs /media/computerbob/liveiso/live/initrd.img | grep resume

to see if conf/conf.d/resume exists. It should not be there, and if it is, that may be the problem.

Right. You need to find the problem with the initrd. Look in the log to see what went wrong in the iso build process.