General :: Which Minimalistic Linux Distro?

I have this project going where I want to have a ton of tiny Virtual Machines running in a simulated network on a single host computer. The various virtual machines will serve a broad variety of purposes, but they will all be very small virtual machines (low-memory, no X11) and will usually only have one or two additional applications installed on each of them aside from the base system.

So, what I want is a super-lightweight Linux distro that provides only a simple base system (no package management needed, or even compiling tools) which I can clone and modify slightly for each machine's purpose.ttylinux seemed like a promising option. The downside I found, though, is that the ttylinux install uses ext2, so every time a system shuts down improperly, I end up losing 10+ files to lost+found.