General :: Minimalistic Distro For Low Resources Netbook?

I want a distro I can run on my very weak netbook, and perhaps on one or two other of my other computers as well. Netbook is an Asus eeePC 900SD (Celeron 800mhz, 512MB RAM, 8GB SDD, 1024x600 screen resolution), very slow with some distros, but nimble with others.

I've tried:
Ubuntu Netbook Remix (EasyPeasy), Leeenux, JoliCloud: too resource hungry on this machine, too much storage consumed just for the OS. Peppermint OS - pros: works well, nice, very few bugs, fast.cons: space requirements, memory requirements make it a bit tight, cloud apps are slower than locally installed ones, the permanent inclusion of a paid-subscription cloud app, and fascist support forum moderators. a bit overweight, and way too cloud-centric - many of the cloud apps are on unreliable servers and not always available or slow down your netbook to a crawl while it waits for some executable code to come off the web. Puppeee version 1.0 (and Fluppy for all netbooks), works very well, very fast, in little RAM with little disk space required. Some may not like the overcrowded menus and their structure that's inherited from the parent Puppy. Puppy 5.1: works very well compared to the 4.3 series. wifi works now. But same menu comments as for Puppeee. Slitaz: at 30MB for the iso, it sounded promising, and the interface is very nice, much nicer than any of the other minimalistic distros. but Wifi? no help on the horizon.
AntiX: some stuff just didn't work properly, including Wifi WPA. but it looked real good. For the space and memory requirements look to Peppermint. TinyMe2010: this is the size of Puppy, and polished like Peppermint. Based on a slimmed-down Unity, it is still in beta, the installer won't install from USB stick. If you have a CD to install from this is a great distro! Lets hope they fix the USB issue soon! Very promising... keep a watch on this one.

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I've tried dozens of distros, and find it frustrating to deal with the various crippling flaws of some distros and the egos of the assemblers of other distros (where they can easily fix something but refuse to because they prefer an older faulty way). I am at my whit's end here. Please help me someone.

From us Noob's point of view: the new re-release of Windows XP for Legacy computers with only 64MB of RAM, it may be time to re-visit our thinking that minimalistic Linux distros are the only kid on the block for those slower machines with less resources. Time to get back to the drawing board and make these a little more user-welcoming. ;-)