O! just thought of this. If your willing to do a little work (i.e. re partition your disk, possible re installation of os) make 2 partitions: one for your OS-necessary files, one for everything else. then, (as root) put the folder you want protected in the OS necessary partition (correct any scripts to point to the new location of the file), and mark that partition as only able to be edited as root. when you want to edit stuff in that partition, you will have to enter the root password. voila!