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pclnuxos, got all the bells and whistles except berl installed by default.
[ has the same UI as Vista without the MS bloat to bog it down. ]

but them there bells and whistles are why I use linux from scratch, I detest them and don't want them on my system at all.

no plugins, no multimedia garbage. just a plain jane ui that works.

There is a brief discussion of PCLinuxOS here:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=41

You can find PCLinuxOS here:
www.pclinuxos.org

Get the 93a Big Daddy version. The 2007 version is still in beta.

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I would set up my system as follows:
The first hard drive would have three partitions. The first partition would be 12 gigabytes and would be used as the root partition. The second partition would be 500 megabytes and would be the swap partition. The third partition would be the data partition and would be mounted at /home. Your normal user accounts have their home directories in the /home directory. That means that when the third partition is mounted at /home then all of the data in the user home directories is going into the third partition.

The first and third partitions would use the ext3 file system. It is a reliable and robust journaling file system. Journaling file systems are said to have several benefits. From my point of view the main advantage is that if a journaling file system is disconnected without being dismounted, such as in a power failure, then it usually does not have to run fsck file system checker before it can be used.

I would create two user accounts. One is for using the Internet. The other is for personal information and it never uses web browsers or IRC or other vulnerable applications. The personal account uses email but otherwise it does not use the network at all.

You have to make sure that the account that uses the Internet cannot read the home directory of the account that has personal information.

You don't necessarily have to log off of the Internet account to use the personal account. I use a terminal window and the su command to log on to the personal account while I'm using the Internet account. Then I set the DISPLAY variable to :0.0 in the personal account and when I start an X application it displays on the same desktop as the Internet account is using. It looks like the TR web server is interpreting part of the contents of the DISPLAY variable as an emoticon. In English, the contents of the DISPLAY variable are colon zero period zero.

In order to do this you have to log in to the Internet account, open a terminal window, and enter the following command.
xhost +localhost
You only have to enter that command one time when you first set up your accounts. That command tells the X window manager to allow other accounts on the local machine to display their X applications on the desktop of the Internet account.

Using this configuration I almost never log on to the console in the personal information account. I always log on to the Internet account. When I want to use data in the personal information account I open a terminal window, enter the su command with a dash after it followed by the name of the personal information account. It looks something like this.

su - personal
Password:
personal>

Then you enter the name of the software that you want to run, such as kmail or kontact. You will see a bunch of messages in the terminal window and if there are no problems then the window of the application that you ran will display on your desktop.

The main vulnerability here is that if the Internet account is running some software that scans the video memory then whatever is displayed on the screen can be read by the Internet account. So your personal emails that are still in video memory could be read by a rogue program that is being run by the Internet account. You can prevent this if you log off of the Internet account and log on at the console to the personal information account.

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I compared KOffice, gnumeric and abiword, and Open Office dot org office document software. I finally decided to use OOo instead of KOffice or abiword and gnumeric. Since KOffice file format is not compatible with OOo you may want to give OOo a test drive before you commit a lot of time to KOffice. You should probably look at gnumeric for spreadsheets and abiword for text documents if you haven't already done so.

Open Office dot org software can be found here:
www.openoffice.org

And yes the "dot org" is officially part of its name due to some restriction on the expression "Open Office".

I chose OOo over KOffice due mostly to compatibility with other software. I receive documents created with MS Office so it was important to be able to read them. While none of the office document software suites that I tried were perfect replacements for MS Office I found that OOo was as close as I could get. I still have trouble with MS Excel macros and graphs and multiple worksheets but can generally get by ok. I still sometimes have to use genuine MS Office to read some files that I receive.

If you don't need compatibility with MS Office then you may still prefer KOffice. I just thought I'd contribute the results of my own testing.

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I hope that you enjoy using Linux. It can be a lot of fun. All of the high quality software that is available for free is amazing. You can find a lot of software for Linux here:

www.sourceforge.net
www.freshmeat.net

You can learn about which software works well and which doesn't by reading Linux web sites such as:

www.linux.com
lxer.com
www.linuxhq.com
www.linuxinsider.com
www.newsforge.com
osnews.com

Those will get you started.