Thank you all very much for your responses, I've learned quite a bit from what you've told me. Like a lot of you I've been a software developer for a large number of years. Recently I broke away from the business of developing software for wages and decided to launch a business that partially makes use of the skills that I learned over the years. At the core of this business will be an engine, if you will, that will be scanning the internet, collecting, categorizing, and analyzing certain information. The information will be presented to me on demand, with which I will make purchase and sales decisions. Once set up and started, this engine has to run constantly in an unattended mode and has to be extremely reliable and robust. It has to be "set it and forget it".
I knew that M'soft didn't have an os that would suit my purposes and, having used Red Hat in the past, I started looking at different Linux distributions. I acquired Knoppix and was literally amazed at how far things had progressed since I last used any Linux system. Then I saw that Knoppix was Debian based and Debian had the concept of stable and unstable etc. That led me to acquiring Debian Woody while still investigating Knoppix. This is why the concept of "stable" is important to me.