explorador - 5:35 pm on Jun 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

I taking on a personal project which requires a basic kiosk system

Try Xpud. It's about 50MB and runs great, fast load, enable your wireless and ethernet drivers and it has built in firefox browser. You can download additional packages with office or whatever you want.

You can boot from CD or live USB, even install it on your desktop as a instant on option.

Sure Ubuntu is a nice option, running from HD provides a very fast boot nowadays but Xpud is still the winner against all (with gui). Other than that, try tinycore, from Simple Linux.
Good luck.