My windows machine is only for the kids to play games (3 and 6 yrs). When I do play ET on that machine, EVERYTHING else is shut down before I play, after all windows is just dos with colors, and dos only does one thing at a time. As for Mandrake, as soon as debian supports my video card in testing, it will be gone! But until then I have to work. As for the stable/testing/unstable debian releases, in a production enviroment, you make customers nervious when you say their mission crit apps are running on a version called testing/unstable, so I run stable in production(servers). As for Gentoo, I have no xp, so I have no comments, but debian, all versions, have served me well (except for workstation vid card, my mistake for going bleeding edge), so if it ain’t broke, I won’t fix it.
Glad you have a solution to your problem, and hope we get a chance to frag each other in the future.