Experiment,sometimes you can prevent the crash with grub bootcode such as noapic , noacpi , etc...
If that doesn't work going into the motherboard bios and turning off one of the cores of the cpu might.

I've tried "noapic" and I don't feel like changing my BIOS settings for this CD, since everything else works. So maybe there is something that I missed or what I've done wrong creating the CD. Or something is wrong with the software that it generally fails on dual core machines? I'm just reporting this to improve things...

on my pc, puppylinux only works with either

acpi=force

or

acpi=off

I've tried now the acpi settings and it's the same crash. The problem is that I get tons of nonsense on the screen, but I'd say according to the number of dots displayed that it happens while it is still unpacking the rootfs. And among the nonsense on the screen there is something like "? unlzma 0x....". So maybe that can be some sort of hint.