These are more or less my wife's suggestions.

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I'd make the explorer better, I find it annoying.

Get rid of Mozilla and use mozilla firebird and providel the advert + pop up filters by default.
Get rid of the lousy kde mail readers, use mozilla thunderbird

Have some kind of general firewalling application there,

Reduce the klutter on the "start menu"

Make the panel icons better.

Have a kind of "Knoppix Update" on the "start menu" that runs apt-get