SBM that adds USB boot support?

Having recently demoted my old ThinkPad 240x to Debian/Testing testbed, I wanted to re-install Debian from scratch on it, to make sure that I would have a clean reference system to work with.

However, this being a very old ThinkPad model, there is no CD-ROM drive to speak of. The only external means of booting is with an optional floppy disk drive. Sure enough, there exists a nice helper called SBM (included in the utility folder on all Debian CDs since several releases) that adds CD-ROM boot support to any BIOS.

Instead, My idea would be to perform the reinstall using the USB stick version of Debian-Installer, bootstrapped by SBM on the floppy disk. Does anybody know of an SBM release that adds USB boot support? If not, is there any other tool that performs a similar trick?

Telling Network Manager to prefer home AP?

I'm running Network Manager on my Ubuntu laptop. It's a really neat tool when it comes to selecting an open wireless network when traveling, but it has one major flaw: you cannot tell it to prefer some "homebase" among a swarm of available Access Points; it insists upon using the first AP it finds, regardless. Has anyone figured out a solution to this common situation?

Meanwhile, the OpenVPN front-end that Network Manager offers only covers a fraction of available parameters, which means that I cannot use it to connect to my dayjob's LAN from outside the company, because the few Windows clients we have connecting to it expect a VPN to work in a specific way and cannot adapt to non-Microsoft approaches to VPN concept, which means that we Ubuntu users are the ones who have to adapt. Thus, the OpenVPN front-end would need to be able to configure MTU, MSS and other arbitrary parameters supported by OpenVPN. Looking at various BTS, I notice that I'm not the only one who needs this. Are Network Manager developers listening? :-)