Buzz,
That combo works fine on my crappy atom PC, same hardware as a windows stick, the only difference is that my pc has a builtin battery. 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 2 USB2 ports.
The only caveat is that you need to add a HDMI screenless dongle so the system will keep awake and use full hardware acceleration when you use remote desktop. I use teamviewer.
I am using connectify (www.connectify.me) to access my headless PC. This software set the wifi card in AP and Client mode at the same time, it is very useful cause while I am at home I can access the box though my home router, while in the field I can access the box directly in AP mode. The nice thing is that once configured you dont need to change anything, just boot the PC and you can always access it regardless if you have internet access.
Before I had an extra wifi card in my system, one was set as AP and the other as client, but I can achieve the same with connectify and the builtin wifi interface.
Cheers,
Jose