I notice lots of kde-i18n-?? packages that appear to be locale specific packages. Can I safely get rid of these packages
Yes
I have removed some unnecessary fonts, and packages I never use, note, many packages are very small themselves, and won't make a whole lot of difference, I removed all palm-pilot packages such as pilot-link etc.

I'm currently on a 56K dial-up (where I typically connect at 37,333 ). Running 'apt-get -u upgrade' needs about 7 hours
Only 7 hours? Mine takes 12 or more, one nice feature of dpkg / apt-get is that it can be stopped and then when restarted it will resume where it was, with knoppix this is a bit more of a problem than stable because of the constant changing repositories.

~rock