Glad you got it working Computer Bob.

Ok so if the xfce4 compositor is the issue, maybe see what happens using compton compositor. Disable xfwm4 compositing in window tweaks then...

# apt install compton

then in a terminal

compton -b

then do drag and drop in thunar and see what messages if any print in the terminal.

control -c to cancel compton.

Perhaps play with mouse settings and see if this helps?

https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/mouse

Okay maybe delete the snapshot and start again.

so delete the snapshot folder in /home/snapshot.

run refractasnapshot again, creating a new snapshot i think is option 1 with uefi disabled.

I dont know anything about the irqbalance and runit-helper packages so just leave them alone for now.

Doing a catfish file search of the whole file system for squashfs is not needed and just wasting your time, all we want to know is that when you create the snapshot and mount it in your file manager you can see the filesystem.squashfs similar to below code snippet. The filesystem.squashfs was missing in your code snippet so all you seem to have had was a usb stick with only 42 megabytes of files in the form of initrd.img, memtest and vmlinuz.This will definitely not boot into a live session as you dont have a filesystem added to boot it.

/media/dice/liveiso/live $ ls -lh 
total 765M
-r--r--r-- 1 dice dice 731M Mar 14 17:18 filesystem.squashfs
-r--r--r-- 1 dice dice  29M Mar 14 17:16 initrd.img
-r--r--r-- 1 dice dice 179K Dec 13  2019 memtest
-r--r--r-- 1 dice dice 5.1M Mar 14 17:15 vmlinuz

Can you please do below command and let us now the output.

uname -a

I have a feeling the ascii kernel is the issue here and still possibly in use instead of the updated kernel. If the snapshot is picking that up the initrd.img is way to small. 4.7M Dec 18 13:22 initrd.img-4.9.0-14-amd64

You need to ls -lh the directory of the liveiso when mounted, for me this directory was

ls -lh /media/liveiso/live

Or it could be with user name...

ls -lh /media/dice/liveiso/live

All good, without your knowledge we would have got nowhere. To me this is a good learning exercise and ive gained some knowledge on the files that control the initrd/initramfs.

Its possible that update and upgrade from ascii to beowulf might leave out some needed drivers as well, just a hunch here but there might be something to it.

Ok so you need to remove /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/driver-policy "driver-policy" file.

Then

# update-initramfs -u

Then make a new snapshot.

I tried to see if this was available on one of my threads and could not see that option so manually edited the subject heading. Maybe because you are admin you have that option ?

Good tool meld, ive used it before but not for something like this, but it worked to diff in directories good-iso vs bad-iso.

I unpacked both initrd.img, the bad iso is 48mb smaller than the good iso when unpacked. The bad iso is missing a lot of kernel object .ko files. I couldnt see an option to extract a report or log from meld to post here. But yeah huge difference.

There is artix linux which is a derivative of archlinux that has 3 different inits to choose from - openrc, runit and s6.

I dont run any headless boxes. But it sounds like a good idea if you have a network of many systems you need to look after. Sorry i couldnt be of any help. Maybe file a bug report again ??

I will get back to you tomorrow on that, thanks.