I never thought of running it in a virtual machine, because I have to use a dirty little thing called "respondus lockdown browser. Earlier versions ran on wine, but respondus have fixed that. I also ave read reports that it doesn't work in a virtual machine, so never bothered to test it.

I've used the bunsenlabs netinstall script in the past, and it is pretty good. The difficulty is that systemd is more than a dependency, it is a necessity for much of BL to work. Hence, I think all I am up to is modifying the BL configs, and altering their pipe menus,

But I need to look at Star; it may fulfil my requirements without any need to alter things. I'll boot into the Star live iso later today, and have a good go at it, to find out.

I'll also post a question at the BL forums later, to see if anyone there has any ideas.

Yes, I;ve downloaded star, and will have a look at it soon,
Thanks.

Thank you all for your comments.
I will go desktop-live first.

On LightDM and xfce, I have used them together in Debian, and all things being equal, they should be fine together surely.