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You aked:
"How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux."

Not painful at all. Really. Everything is pretty much point and drool these days.

"How would I operate a modem dial-up connection, for instance. Would my Netscape browser work? Would cut and paste still work?"

Using a modem is as easy as clicking on an icon and hitting the "dial" button. The first time you will need to put in a phone number, but you'll be typing into a nice friendly graphical app.

Netscape absolutley works. In fact much of the development of the newer versions is done on linux.

Cut and paste work, but differently.

"Could I still use MS Word and Excel?"

Yes and no. You can run Word or Excel under Linux if you set up windows emulation. VMWare is excellent at this (it actually emulates a complete computer, not just windows), and many windows app will run under WINE.

On the other hand, there's no need to. I haven't touched Word or Excel for almost a year. OpenOffice does everything I need, and I trade files back and forth with Word users all the time. I also use it on my windows PC, not just my linux box.

I'd suggest getting a beginner friendly distribution, and if you have an older computer sitting around you don't use much, try it out. Mandrake is an excellent distro, very user friendly and will grow with you.

If you have a broadband connection you can download the entire distro (3 cds), or you can buy it for about $30 at CompUSA/MicroCentre/Best Buy/etc. For the price you get the CDs, a book, and technical support. If you don't want the book or support you can buy the CDs alone from CheapBytes online for $3.99.

If you use the KDE environment you might not realise you're not using windows.

Thanks. I may try it. I'm just so sick of my Win95 just crashing for no reason in the middle of something.

Is there a reasonably priced Linux HTML/web authoring tool equivalent to (hopefully better than) Front Page?