Some of us have similar situations, and don't have the luxury of ditching Windows. After last July's nasty hijacker, I tried Mandrake 9... until the wife-unit turned on me. She uses Win2K at work and brings piles of it home. That, plus hardware problems, made it just not worth it.
Ouch. Wife-units must be treated very gently, with lots of attention, or they can become ... well, you fill in the blanks.
;^D
MSOffice files? I finally bit the bullet and bought CrossOver Office so I could run MSOffice2000 under SuSE linux.
I tried the free demo for a month and then pried open my wallet spent $39 for the software - which explains the recent rash of earthquakes. But I digress.
So far all my macros and old spreadsheets seem to work as before - I consider myself to be an advanced Excel user (not so much with Word). And I've been feeding the resulting Word and Excel files to ten different users with different OS/MSO/hardware configs with zero compatibility issues to date - KoW.
Best of all, I'm spend a lot less time maintaining the system.
Linux isn't for everybody but if you've tried it and MSOffice compatibility was your major roadblock - it's well worth trying the COO free demo.
I'm still laughing about that little comment !
For your sake, I hope she doesn't read your posts on FR.