Would enabling this in the sudoers file not have the desired effect?
# %users localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h now... and maybe extending it a bit also ....
Just wondering .....
This would. I think that in matter of configurations "to ease for beginners", it's better in this version not to go too deep in the system. If someone takes this version and wants to make it lighter, create a version with security features and so on... or a web server, file server, whatever : he will just get rid of shutown-dialog.py, lxpanel, and that's about it. There are very few depends to theses. (shutdown-dialog needs pygtk and lxpanel I think nothing special, or very few).
Just to remind : PCLinuxOS Openbox does not need any panel. All you need is in the right-click thanks to menu.xml, rc.xml files and openbox-menu program. I put this one thinking of how that could be provided for children in an educational version, as Crow started to work on one, and I wanted to work on one as well. So teachers and children will want to get something looking very much like what they already know, with a panel providing classical menus.