Catching up tonight on the BSD on a stick: an OpenBSD install to/from USB install worked fine and the blue Ethernet cable worked fine. The Achilles heel was the laptop's built-in wifi did not have native support so I used a spare USB WIFI adapter that also didn't work well/reliably. So I ended up sticking to using Ethernet. The basic moral of the story is to thoroughly check hardware support in advance. I'm used to being fairly lax recently because I buy devices with Linux. OpenBSD is superb.