I've used the O'Reilly "Knoppix Hacks" book to setup a Knoppix CD that boots to kiosk mode with the exception that instead of running mozilla I'm running Lotus Notes via Wine.
Also, I've configured Wine to use my USB drive as it's windows directory so that I can easily modify my Notes install without remastering knoppix boot CDs.
When I boot to KDE instead of Kiosk mode I can manually start everything up just fine, but when I let the CD boot up and try to start in kiosk mode and auto launch Lotus Notes it fails because /mnt/sda1 isn't mounted. If I use Ctrl-Alt-F1 and use:
mount /mnt/sda1
and then do:
init 2 && init 5
Everything works fine.
Is the Kiosk mode running something like Windows "Safe-Mode", where not everything is started at boot up like normal?