Live USB with "factory defaults" restore for kiosk thin client

I want to set up a kiosk client based on Alix.1C and Compact Flash storage. What is the best distribudion to use? I want basic XFCE desktop with Firefox and maybe Abiword and Gnumeric.

I am thinking of using Debian or Ubuntu (which is slower unfortunatelly, but recognizes audio by default) live USB images with persistent casper-rw (debian calls it init-ramfs) partition. I want to make some customizations in the "persistent" partition.

I plan to create another "rescue" partition that will overwrite the basic "factory default" settings to the casper-rw if the system breaks (hopefully the live system partition is write-protected even if on usb).

In the end I have to set up some boot parameter (syslinux or grub?) to reset the system to defaults.

Anyone has a suggestion where I should begin?

I'd go Debian, but that's me.

And, why not KDE w/ Konqueror? I've seen those solutions in Bulgaria, and it works pretty fine (KHTML is Safari's engine as well, it's very good)..

Well,

the Geode is not that powerful and space matters too - therefore Xfce. Firefox because of its extensions.