Ha! Solved! I am now running amd64 on this. Once again thanks to brynet@ for suggestions and helping me to troubleshoot, below are his ideas:
Method to get it working is: 1) perform an i386 install from CD (i386 on usb is not visible to this Macbook's EFI, and amd64 crashes both from CD and stick). Works without a hitch. 2) Swap out the i386 /bsd.rd with the amd64 one 3) Boot into the newly added amd64 bsd.rd and perform a standard reinstall. It seems this way both the 32bit and 64bit quirks are happy and satisfied. Now to figure out how to rightclick with a one-button mouse in X11!
