thank you for the help

[nachral]

thank you all for the help, it is greatly appreciated

[rickenbacherus]

every program that i download has an option for windblows an sometimes mac...

option?

but i am concerned that many of these progs will become unavailable to me when i make the complete switch to linux...is this a concern? i am not interested in ambiguous explanations, but would love to hear some solid answers yes or no,

You want a solid answer to a vague question.

or if these problems are patchable/non-existent, as it will play a major role in my decisin. i do not play video games but download a lot of mp3's...what do u guys think?

The only way I know of to find out is to be specific as to which apps you are referring to. Look here and here and you may find what you're looking for.

[nachral]

did not mean to ask stupid questions, thank you for all of your help

[rickenbacherus]

.as far as specifics, i have installed currently in winxp- sygate firewall, tds3 anti trojan, avg antivirus, wormguard. lavasoft adware, spybot seek and destroy (adware detector) regseeker (registry cleaner), purgeie, yahoo insatant messenger, and creative labs multimedia player,

Of all the apps mentioned I am only unsure of 2. You can use GAIM or other clients to connect not only to yahoo but also msn, aol, gadu-gadu, jabber and more. The anti-virus/trojan/spyware/wormguard isn't a concern in Linux. This is OSS (open source software), not freeware that installs a little something extra whether you like it or not.
You can spend the time it normally takes for those activites to learn Linux instead.
I have no idea what purgeie or creative labs media player (although I can take a guess on the former). If purgeie is "purge internt explorer" then there are no worries about that here. As far as media players are concerned there are many but I have no idea how they compare to creative labs.