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Samsung among many others manufacture "dumb" screens for purposes such as digital signage so start loff by ooking for resellers of that. Something which doesn't quite fit your specs but that I have been considering to get is one of these: http://www.elotouch.com/Products/IDS/5500L/default.asp.

Companies (Elo Acustic Pulse Recognition) are already using this technology. They can detect the location of the touch, and they do an OK job with finger drag. They cannot detect when you take your finger off the surface.
If these limitations are OK, they you get a cheap touch screen that lets you use a scratch resistant glass surface.

TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone, which is rather unique.

Triangulating touch position using multiple "microphones" (in this case, peizoelectric widgets mounted to the glass surface, but the concept is the same) has been done before, and isn't particularly new. (More info and whitepaper.)

I'm confused why this is new. Resistive touch screens have always been a polymer surface that could be attached to anything. For example:
http://www.elotouch.com/Technologies/AccuTouch/howitworks.asp

I worked at Carroll Touch for a while on Touch screen drivers for their IR and Guided wave products. Before that in 1990-1992 I worked at Laser Plot and worked on adding touch screen for their Ship Navigation Systems.

The problem that many applications ran into is that people have fat fingers. A mouse is much more precise than a finger. Many people who looked at Touch technology just treated it like a mouse, which makes for a had interface. When people get exposed to a mouse/keyboard interface converted into touch, they repulsed by touch and never look back.

If you design an interface from the start to be touch based, you can get a very nice interface.

Presumably they've cleared this with ELO, manufacturers of iTouch touchscreens. If your bank's ATM has a touchscreen CRT, it's probably an iTouch.

Then there's Logitech's iTouch., and the Logitech iTouch cordless keyboard and mouse.

And yes, both have registered trademarks.

Elo Touchsystems / Tyco already has a product out there that works exactly this way...and a myriad of patents. Acoustic Pulse Recognition: http://media.elotouch.com/pdfs/marcom/apr_wp.pdf

It's a relatively new product but it's already way past the research stage and well into production.

I'll start off by saying that I typically don't recommend overly expensive (because I'm a tightwad), but in this case I'll make an exception.

Allen Bradley uses Elo Touch products for thier industrial control touch screen PC's. These things are wonderful IMHO - I didn't want to see the ones I had leave when the project was done, and they had to go be installed on site - I love mine as a nice 21" desktop montitor and touchscreen combo :-) These critters are a bit hefty price wise, but I haven't seen one fail yet in the field (and these are industrial areas - either gritty dirt or greasy type stuff). They are pretty nice displays, but a little more faded color wise than I'd like to normally use for a desktop application like Photoshop. Incredibly durable, lots of different styles, and they have excellent accuracy. I recommended 'em.

What I DON'T recommend is going with the lowest priced one you find. It will fail. Seriously. Don't be afraid to take your time, and find out what has the longest time between failures -vs- ruggedness (they don't always go together) -vs- the features you need. Anything less than what you need for the application is going to REALLY hurt you later.

As for programming for one - if it's on Windows, no problem. It's just a one-button mouse. They also have Linux, Mac, etc. drivers - it's just sending ya' mouse coordinates and a mouse click. For most applications, it's ready to roll before you even see the touch screen, it's that simple.

lots of companies that work with kiosk cabinets google for "kiosk cabinet".

Not knowing what your software already looks like, this site asks some good questions for a touchscreen application.

one of the tubes in my computer died.

Given that the only "vacuum tube" in a modern PC is the cathode ray tube in a traditional display, you might want to try looking into an LCD panel with twice the life (even longer if you replace the internal light) one-third the footprint, one-third the weight, one-third the power consumption, and one-third the eyestrain of a CRT. Even though an LCD may cost more up front, you will save money in the long run by going with an LCD.