As advised I started out with Knoppix-Lite. I stripped out KDE and added Fluxbox. I wanted a mini that would give me a some tools to work and some toys for messing around.

In KDE's place I added:
Abiword + English version
Phoenix (apt-get version)
Flash player (sitting inside Phoenix)
Mplayer
Emelfm
Vim
Flite (small text to speech utility)
gftp
tinyirc
Gkrellm
XPilot
The Gimp
Xchat (if it wasn't already there, can't emember )

Knoppix-Lite already had a lot of nice apps, and I left most of them in place.
If anybody wants a copy of it I'll look into puting it up on someone's ftp server.

Next I want t see if I could make an X enabled BBC (sub 50mb) out of Knoppix, again, it wouldn't really be a rescue disk like lnk-bbc, more like a toy with some fun but small apps and light desktop tools.