i whipped up a simple fan cct to cool the bulb while its off what do you guys think? pros or cons? i will also be changing fusing to the hot side. i also plan on adding temp feed back so if the LCD gets to hot it will shut off the ballast

Circuit Here

Seems OK, It's quite tidy actually

What Op-Amp are you planning to use... a 741 ??

In fact thinking about it if you were you use a dual op-amp you could configure the other as a comparator, with a potential divider on the input consisting of a thermistor & variable resistor to do the temp monitoring for your ballast shutdown..... hmmm..... I like it !

you read my mind about the temperature sensor!. well im just gonna use whatever opamps i have around to save money. i just wanna keep things simple to get the job done. im not worried about restrike time either so theres less things in the box to fail

I might be misinterpreting your schematic but something looks wrong with the opamp setup. I interpret that schematic as charging the capacitor to 12v when the projector is on and then discharging it to ground through the resistor when the project goes off. In the off state both inputs to the opamp will be grounded, or nearly grounded. What you really want is for the positive input to drop below the negative input. It is likely that this circuit might still work but I would be worried about reliability and I don't think your 8 minute estimate is correct.

I would suggest you bias the negative input to the opamp at something above 0v. You can do this using 2 resistors setup as a voltage divider. If you set the - input voltage to 0.37*12v then neglecting leakage paths the circuit will remain on for exactly 96seconds as you calculated.

Hope this helps.