Thanks, James, that did the trick. So now I have set up two desktops, one a vanilla xterm and the other specifically for this purpose, runs my script in a gnome-terminal and it appears to be working properly, no funky pop-ups or anything. Thanks again for your help!
Glad you got it working Miranda. A silly side-question...
Would a regular ol' text console have done what was needed? CTRL-ALT-F1...
Did your users need the real-estate of an X based terminal in the recovery console?
-- Nate Duehr denverpilot@me.com