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That's an intriguing idea -- I never thought about that.

I might be in a good position to do this, too. I have a pretty large desk at home with plenty of space on it (I use a 7-foot buffet table, going back to my days in engineering school when I needed the room to unfold drawings). My new computer will be a laptop for portability (I'm on the road maybe once a week), but since I hate laptop screens and small keyboards I plan to use a docking station so I can connect my desktop keyboard and my desktop monitor. Is there any way to connect the two CPUs to a single router so I can transfer files between them if necessary?

Certainly it's possible (and easy with XP) to network your browsing computer to any of a number of other computers you have, but doing so introduces a risk of contamination even with firewalls enabled. I would never do it because then I'd want to install antivirus software on the networked computers (which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place).

Not everyone can benefit from using my type of setup (some may not have a spare computer). My reasoning for having my setup this way is to prevent contamination of my good computers which have lots of software and sensitive or fragile applications running on them by COMPLETELY ISOLATING them from the Internet, which for all practical purposes, is the only real source of viruses and such. That lets my cheapo computer take all the risk, and even if it does get loaded up with viruses, I don't care because there's not much on it to be affected anyway. I also find the performance hit that antivirus programs put on my computers to be unacceptable.

If you NEED to transfer files you've downloaded from the Internet to other computers, you'll need to isolate any suspect files on your hard drive and run an antivirus scan on them which doesn't need to be running all the time (only when you want to scan something). Keep in mind any antivirus program needs to be constantly updated and there is no guarantee that they'll catch everything even if they are. Then transfer clean files by burning them to a CD or DVD or by using a thumb drive or something similar via a USB port.

The other suggestions on this thread are mostly sound and I'd recommend one of those instead of my setup if you really aren't able to have a single browsing computer totally isolated.