Saltgrass,
Thank you very much for your reply.
Actually at first I didn't even try booting from a flash drive because I assumed (incorrectly) that since the BIOS had only two USB devices (floppy and CDROM) listed as boot options that a flash drive boot was not supported. I have since created a bootable flash and successfully installed Windows 7 on the netbook from it using the boot from CDROM boot option.
The fact that a USB flash boot option wasn't explicitly listed in the BIOS boot option coupled with there being a distinction between booting from two other USB device types is what misled me.