After re-reading your first post, I have a few more thoughts. Any operating system (Linux or Windows) should be shut down properly to avoid corruption. You could simply hook up a wireless keyboard and mouse and not have to modify your cabinet. When it is time to shut down, use the keyboard and/or mouse. Also, if that is not an option, you could create an image of your working PC and if it ever gets corrupt, restore the image. This works fine as long as you don't make any changes to it. If you do, first restore the old image to get rid of any corruption, make your changes, and then make a new image.