OK, after playing with PCLinuxOS LiveCD for a couple days, i must say its pretty impressive. Nice GUI, good features built right-in.. LOL, its now time to actually work out what i want to do and see which apps are best to use

I'll give LMint a look, just so i can wage in the debate on Gnome and KDE

Thanks for all the help... any more info is greatly appreciated. Especially with networking and AV/spyware stuff on linux. And Wifi support?

cheers guys, keep up the good work!