I have a VM up for testing. Looks like I'm working in reverse order here... Going from what I thought was hardest to what I thought was easiest.
So far I've managed to get the shut down routine working reasonably well. I have the command stored in /etc/rc.local. I did not know about this... As a file owned by root the user needs to be in the a sudoers list in order to edit it. It looks like the timer begins as soon as the computer enters mode 5. Thanks go to Steve for pointing out I can cancel the shutdown command with a "-c" option. Again, this only works if the account is in the sudoers list. The cool thing is by using the "at" command the shutdown program isn't running through the whole session. I like the halt option because we don't have to be there for it to work.
I can get notification of sorts if there is a terminal/shell open. It isn't likely the people using the machine will use the terminal so I'm going to look at my samples for zenity scripts and try one of those to generate a pop-up. Since zenity is still part of Gnome this should take about 10 minutes if I can find where I left my samples. ;-)
After that I'll follow through with Sean W.s suggestion about tar-ing the user directory, wiping it out, then doing a restore.
Things should go really well. I'll be setting it up this Friday (I have an XP repair to do first - the user took off the AV software and replaced it with a trojan claiming to be AV software). If all goes well it should be running by the end of the day.
Thanks everybody for your help. If the people in charge see it working better than the XP machine sitting next to it, we will probably have TWO Linux machines as public access machines. ;-)
Later Mike