I just picked one up from a friend a few days ago. It's a Xenon motherboard, one of the original Core systems without HDMI, but I did get a 20gb hard drive with it.

1. I'm thinking of getting a 32gb SanDisk Cruzer Fit to plug into it and use for both extra storage and the ability to take my profile with me. Thoughts? (I would probably not be using this for PC data because I have Dropbox set up on both of my computers and that's all I really need. Although I might set up Slax on it, not sure yet.)

2. I know that 360 drives are just laptop drives in a custom enclosure. Would I see any difference in performance if I were to get a SSD to put into mine? There's a locally owned game store in the nearest city I could ask to do that.

3. Can you transfer content licenses between profiles? The friend I got the system from says he has no intention of getting another one and that I'm welcome to all of his DLC and Live Arcade games.

4. Does anyone have experience with homebrew dashboards? I have mine updated to current, so I'm pretty sure I can't get it J-Tagged, but if it dies, I was thinking about getting a dual-NAND slim 360, with an RGH dashboard and a legit Microsoft dashboard.

Anybody?

I own a 360 and I am actually not much help with most of these but I think I can help a bit....

1) The drive thing would be handy for profile, characters etc etc although if you are going to pay for Live too they have like 500mb or something of cloud saves and you can download your profile to another Xbox although this is a major pain in the ass with security and you have to log into the email you used and everything.

2 and 4) I'm totally not sure on these but any sort of messing around with the console can result in a ban as far as I know and I am unsure of how system updates and stuff would affect this.

3) I tried to Google this but it seems to actually be down. :/ Anyways I think your best bet is to just take your friends profile and then keep it on that Xbox. That should allow all users on that console to use the games but you would have to log on as him to download, redownload etc. and you should probably do any DLC purchasing for his games through that account.

I had to transfer one game one time and there is a limit of doing it like twice a year I think and assuming that is per item... Good luck with that! :D

Anyways good luck with your Xbox.
Ya should probably check out this page:

http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-live/marketplace-and-purchasing/download-content#a1d4b52e44b1477fb3078ab6547c04b5

And now good luck with your headache. :D

1. 32GB is the max supported drive, so it should work fine. Just make sure you get a drive that has good read and write speeds. When the drive is formatted it takes up the full flash drive and only leaves a couple megs, so you can't really use it for other stuff.

2. You can't install any old hard drive on a non-modded 360 as they have to be flashed with the proper security sector. There are some Western Digital drives that can be flashed like that and usually run about $50 for a 320GB if you get them pre-done.

3. Content bought and downloaded on a 360 has both a local license and a profile license. Local license lets any profile on that system play that game/DLC. Only some avatar crap is locked to the profile. So anything they bought before and downloaded to the system should work fine as long as you have the game installed.

You can transfer licenses to a new system once every 3 months I think. Then you go through your download history and have it download the files again to make new local licenses on the new machine. This also means if you have a system that is going to stay offline and transfer to a new system, the old one will continue to play everything until it goes online again and has it's licenses wiped.

4. If you do any kind of hardware modding to the system I'd recommend staying off live. Even the simplest of things like how many read errors a disc gives are checked and can result in a ban. If you do mod the system, you can use external hard drives and your games should work regardless. Like if you have a legit 360 then copy the games from it over to the RGH one.