Most of the Public Access systems I've seen are Internet Koisks. IE, they have a touch screen and a "Virtural Keyboard" on the screen that you type into. These machines usually run Windows 2000, and I have seen a few that crashed to a MS-DOS looking startup screen where several system files were corrupt and required recovery...

These machines didn't run Internet Explorer, but rather some other browser software that relied on Internet Explorer to work. I think they were vulnerable to what IE was vulnerable to, but anyways...

If you run into a software keyboard and it has a keylogger you are probably screwed. If I remember right, the one I used would take your text into the Virtural Keyboard's text buffer, and the program would paste it into the textarea box on the webpage. If that was running a keylogger, there is no way to bypass that since it would simply log the result of the buffer. Of course that is a little paranoid, but it is possible. If the machine has a normal keyboard, it may have a hardware keylogger which connects between the keyboard and the PC. It can't or shouldn't be able to log mouse movements, since the keyboard port is/should be unidirectional, it can't send data out to the keylogger or keyboard. Instead, hardware keyloggers will wait for a key combination from the keyboard, and then paste their buffer into the PC by essentially typing everything in there. Maybe trying keycombinations will discover these. I have no other ideas for different kinds of software keyloggers or ways to detect them. A little paranoid, but there you have it. BTW, I've used some pay internet koisks in Guam to check my hotmail account and I haven't seen any weird stuff in my sent box or anything... I can't gurantee the same thing for you though.

Like has been mentioned, your own laptop or PC may be the best defense. Then you have to worry about packet sniffers, but as long as your data is encrypted you'd be fine. Just get a software firewall so you don't get rooted while you are away. Good luck on your trip.