Zipslack problem

[Jes and guide dog Harley]

Hi all,
I'm trying to test zipslack on a system I have running that is a pentium 3, 450 mhz, with a 20 gb hard drive and 128 mb of ram. I
unzipped the zipslack directory in the root level directory of my windows drive, and edited linux.bat to point to my partition. I
copied the appropriate speakup kernel bz image from the speakup.s file and renamed it to vmlinuz, however, when I type linux.bat
at a dos prompt the computer locks up and I  get no speakup output. I did notice one of my start up messages saying the cpu was in
v86 mode and I thought you had to disable this for zipslack to work. Also, himem.sys and emm386.exe seem to be okay, unless I
missed something somewhere.
I'd appreciate any help, I am using a double talk lt synthesizer. Thanks a lot.
Jes