First of all I'm giving a big thumbs up to your efforts, and the work you're doing ... there just aren't enough people like you and the people you volunteer with.

Now to tackle your questions one at a time:

1) I have been reading the remastering HOWTO's. One thing is not yet clear: in the remastering process can you actually be within the new loaded desktop environment (eg xfce4) making desktop changes that will be eventually imaged, or do you need to edit the appropriate xfce config files by hand??
You sure can, just do a search for UnderScore's HOWTO , and you will be interested in the start of the last half section where he runs X from with in the chrooted environment.

2) what heavy applications/libraries can we delete that would not affect a user who will not be doing any development/programming and not using anything except English? For example any internationalization stuff we can remove and any other suggestions appreciated.
Some ideas are for you are:
1. dpkg -l | grep i18n # Display all internationalisation packages most of which you can remove.
2. You can remove the man pages, not a real necessity for people who are using computers for internet.
3. Write down what you want to provide them, identify what applications will achieve that, remove the rest (except system stuff, apt-get will normally tell you)
4. deborphan is your friend

3) what is the easy way to remove all KDE components?
The quick and dirty way is: "apt-get remove kde-libs", just take a not of what it is going to uninstall just in case you need to put one or two back.

Just for your benefit remastering is an iterative process, you remove one or two, test it out if ain't broke remove one or two more. If you don't rush it, it can be a very painless process.

Goodluck[/url]