I can't emphasize this enough, make sure you have defragmented your Windows hard drive first, you will not be able to install Ubuntu properly until you do that.
Folks, I am up and running on ubuntu. thanks so much for all of your help. I had decided to just wipe out XP and start fresh on this computer.
A few annoying hiccups, like the music player not being able to play mp3's. But by and large everything works just fine.
Now, what I am going to do over the next two years as I conduct business on my XP machine is to constantly ask myself if I can do the same task on Linux/open office.
Hopefully by the time my XP machines are near dead I will be able to make a full transition to Linux, as I refuse to have anything to do with Vista.