Thanks for your replies, they increase my slowly expanding knowledge on linux.

When chosing a linux file system for my hd linux install, is there any advantage to ext2 vs ext3, vs some other linux system? I made a persistant home dir on a memory stick to use until I have time to do the full install, and I noticed it formatted the memory stick to ext2. Is this what knoppix prefers? Is there something "better"?

I'm thinking that I might make the WinXP drive a FAT32 so that I could store my CD collection on that and encode from both WinXP and Knoppix. Or, I could use the 120 gig for the Knoppix install and have a FAT32 share on the 20 gig, which I could do a 15/5 split on for WInXP with NTFS. XP with all my crap installed right now only takes about 11 gigs or so. I don't really anticipate getting 4 gigs of Windows software for quite some time.

If anyone has any recomendations or comments on my setup, I'd love to hear them. Thanks again for the help that's been provided, I've found it useful.