cant boot tinycore gui

I have an ancient machine that can only boot from floppy or CD. I purchased a TinyCore CD online and booted it, and it worked well. I installed some extensions and got it working, but i noticed that it was tinycore version 3.2 which is very old. so i bought an external burner and burned the latest .iso for tinycore and booted it but could not get the desktop. only the command line. i also burned the latest coreplus and got the same result. When booting it looks normal and loads extensions but then spits out:

't open '/opt/.tce_dir': no such file or directory

and:

/tc/.wbar: file exists

then gives a command prompt. when i enter

i get:

/tc/.wbar: file exists

But if i boot from the original tinycore 3.2 everything works again. also i've noticed that i can't delete files. They reappear on reboot. just trivial things like a screenshot or a txt file. Do i have to undo something from the first boot in order for newer versions to boot properly? I tried just deleting .wbar but that didn't help. It reappeared on the next reboot anyways. Is there a straight forward way to wipe everything and start fresh? Any clues or tips would be appreciated.