Bad habits die hard! With that in mind, I'm so used to using Windows with full admin that I've been doing the same in Linux. I would like to create a regular user, but keep all the customizations I've done while signed on as root. Could I just copy the entire contents of /root to /home/user? I don't want to start from scratch with my regular user account.

Also, which files can I edit to customize LILO's bootmenu? You know the red box that comes up when you boot. I would like to change the colors to something different. If that's as good as it gets, then I'll be looking into installing GRUB.

KDE doesn't transfer well, but there is something on these forums on that. Everything else should just need a cp and a chown.

There is a way to put up a bitmap for LILO on the net somewhere. I used "lilo bitmap" when I was looking for a way to do that. Now, I think that LILO should left alone. Why should you care how pretty a boot selection screen is that only comprises of .01% of your computing experience?

The short answer is yes, mostly. There's a similar thread to this here and a good point was made that you should run the applications as the user before copying over the settings in case the app relies on files in other locations that aren't covered in the copy.

I downloaded Grub package from linuxpackages.net which came with nice slackware bootsplash. Mainly because I don't know how to configure LILO Easier to use AFAIK.

Sure. Just change the owner of the files with
chown -R yourUser:users /home/yourUser

You need to edit /etc/lilo.conf
Afterwards you have to run lilo.
See "man lilo.conf" for the configuration possibilities. You can even set up a nice bitmap instead of the red box.

Edit: I'm far too slow

You can get a boot image with lilo - I got a nice black and white slackware logo
Check this page out: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Graphical_Lilo

As for copying stuff from root to home I would think it would work. At least with settings in . files and with correct permissions set etc. I would add the user, try to run some apps and then copy over the .files. etc

I have transferred one KDE account to another. After creating the user account, do not login with that account right away. Then copy config files. Then within all config files search and replace all occurrences of /root to /home/username. This search and replace will work with most config files because most are text files.

Some caveats, however, is that some of those config files will contain references such as a list of most recently used files and those text links likely will point to files stored in /root, which mortal users (normally) do not have access to. Those references need to be deleted because even after performing a search and replace, no such file exists.

Of course, as mentioned, when you copy files be sure to chown them to the new user account.

Another option, before creating the user account, is to copy known good config files to /etc/skel. Then, when you create the new account those files will be copied to the new account. See if the following helps:

Creating a Nominal /etc/skel Directory

Regardless of your approach, you can experiment and try this with no permanent damage. If a copied config file fails then that will not damage anything.

I doubt the copy thing will work fine, i had lots of problem when i did the same thing, untimately ended up , deleting all files from the user home directory. U can change the color in lilo menu, refer to lilo man page