>> Can you add/more I/O wait states to the cpu
Yes, I believe that there's one position on one of the DIP switches to do that. Easy enough to do, but I've never tried it. I'll turn it on and see what happens. As I expected, switching LS for the HCT244 and 240 didn't do anything except let the 7805 run a lot cooler.
I'm also thinking that maybe since the board seems to work right after a "write", that I ought to just add a "write" to the init. code? Most of these compact flash modules I'm using have 64 sectors per track, so why not just sacrifice one (at the very end of track 0), and always write a bunch of zeroes to it on initialization? 32k of system space is way more than I'll ever need. It's a kludge, but if it works ......