+x will suffice, a+x is just 'all'+x, i.e. user/group/other execute bits. It doesn't matter, as there are only two users: Root and user.
(there's +x, u+x, g+x, ug+x o+x, and ugo+x (which is the same as a+x. +x is the same as u+x.) You can see what's set with 'ls -l filename'

That would have worked with the old SysV tar program (as found on some Unix systems), but GNU tar as well as the NIT busybox tar will strip off the leading '/' character, if you specify one. Thus, you can't store absolute paths in the tar file (this is meant to be a security feature).
Example:
As you can see it stores "etc/hosts" and not "/etc/hosts" in the tar file. Thus, tar xvf etc.tar would create the etc/hosts directory/file in the directory I happen to be in, it wouldn't restore it to /etc/hosts (unless I did a 'cd /' before tar xvf)

load-applet-run is an applet I found for my OS2007 setup, I believe it used to be available for OS2008 as well.. but I can't find it anymore. Only old versions.