That's the nice thing about 98/2k -- no Ghost, don't know what Windows PE is, and if there's trouble I boot a Linux CD.
Still haven't found the "perfect" Linux distro though. Suse 10 is pretty good but some setup is (typically) poorly documented. It's still a bit heavyweight for my liking; a 1.3 GHz box out to be snappier than it is -- the "media ripping" box at 550 MHz Win2k, is faster.
The goodwife has experience supporting others' machines with XP. That's why we don't have it.
What would it take to do a clean Linux install on my Wintel box, then set up XP Pro to run on a virtual machine inside that? I watched a guru friend do that on his dual-core intel MacBook -- OSX installed and XP running inside a Parallels VM -- and it was really tight. I was blown away, frankly, but I don't necessarily want to drop the change for a new 'puter, so I'd like to know more about the possibility of doing something similar with Linux, first.