Sugestions

[Lord UnR34l]

Hy. Even if I am not a mint user, I like the distro. And I like your plans. So I have some sugestion.
The list would be long, but the best is :
Look at the folowing distros: Tinyme and Tinyflux. Even if they are based on pclinuxos and rpm, you should learn a lot. And a mini-cd is 200 mb not 350. I have just buyed one.
You should use openbox + lxde. and here is a small list of apps wich I sugest:
-Opera, not firefox. Opera is smaller and has more features. But if you really want to install firefox add firefdtp and wyzo(torrent) add-ons.
-Pidgin
-Sylpheed-Claws GTK2
-BitTorrent -Wyso addon from firefox or transmission
-irc-opera has allready an irc client
-GIMP -too big and too many dependencies. Better mtpaint or gpaint
-Abiword+Gnumeric
-Mplayer
-Exaile! or audacious
-Sunbird Calendar
-Sound Juices
-Serpentine
-mintApps (except mintMenu, but its still installed)
-beryl-no, too big, too many dependencies.
I wish you succes.

[JAK]

I agree completely about taking a close look at TinyMe for pointers. They did a great job with that distro. I have an older laptop that would appreciate a lighter version of Mint. If TinyMe were Deb/Ubuntu based, I'd be using it. Actually, I did try it as a LiveCD but I couldn't get the wireless network running. The CD drive is slow, so I couldn't really judge the speed of it accurately on my laptop. TinyMe works great on a VirtualBox though.

If I weren't such a noob and I knew what I was doing, I'd make an OpenBox version myself. But, since I don't have a clue about these things, all I can do is beg for someone to do this.

[kayakaholic]

how about calling it softmint to make it sound snazzier?

[Jorpheus]

Since this is software suggestions, here be my suggestion(s)

SLiM login manager. Ditch GDM or its KDE counterpart.
Firefox 3. The last version of Opera has serious Flash issues, Opera is not open source, I personally find it bloated, and it's UGLY without extra work (look at it in TinyMe, for example). Oh and it's not extensible in any useful way, which is the main advantage of Firefox.
PCMan FM and Tux Commander. It's quite obvious why PCMan FM, but perhaps not why Tux Commander. Well, it's somewhere between GNOME Commander and Krusader, but more like the former, ie fast and bloatless. Also, it has very few dependencies (I _think_), unlike the mentioned two. Who would have thought someone will write a worthwhile program in (Object) Pascal? :p
Leafpad as the default text editor. It's small and fast, and preferable to Mousepad. 'Nuff said. For something more advanced, maybe Minimum Profit or medit or Editra?
Panels. I already mentioned lx and py -panel in another post, there's a few others, but I think these are the best as far as speed and customization go. lxpanel has a menu, but you can't edit it manually, or so I think, which makes it more or less useless, as not many people would go editing .desktop files.
Searchmonkey or some similar utility. Most newbies don't even know find, locate and grep even exist.
As for terminals, mrxvt has tabs, transparency and is very light and configurable. But no UTF-8 (I think) and no copying, which can be a problem. One that does is TermIt (based on Sakura).
VLC eliminates the need for video codecs (there's even a Firefox plugin), but that is far from being its only strength.

I'll add more when/if I have more suggestions. Oh and yes, these are just that, suggestions.