In theory a good idea. In practice, totally unworkable. What about downloading, online gaming, e-mail, etc. and trying to maintain preferences, cookies, etc. Who except a masochist would want to perpetually be in a state of reformatting, restoring, reinstalling, reconfiguring, reupdating, etc.? Unless this guy browes in a completely generic, image-free, courier text-based, non-interactive, vanilla environment, I don't see how this could work.
Not unworkable- but it will need some geek savvy to set it up.
You set up the naked Internet machine once. Tweak all the configurations, patch it current, install all of the software you want on it. Then, before you 'go live' with it, you use Ghost to make a copy of the contents of the hard drive. Make the copy in the drive of the other machine on the LAN. Get a boot disk or two made that connect you to the other machine, and have the Ghost client on them.
When you need to reimage the machine, you pop the boot disk in the floppy drive, it mounts the NIC and maps a path across the network to where the Ghost drive image is stored.
You have it reimage the naked net unit- and it is totally redone just as it was before in about twenty to thirty minutes- with all of your configurations intact. Just reboot the naked unit, and you're off again with a fresh machine.
Personally, I prefer to lumber around heavily armored, but that's just me.
perhaps
It is not all that much trouble to reformat and reload. We are not talking a ton of programs to reinstall if you go with this idea. Basically you are turning your computer into a TV for the internet - that's what has you online 90% of the time.
As for email, better to use the free services for your email than to run on your own machine. I would never do that. Outlook is a virus magnet.