Thanks for the reply, times

You could always tackle Gentoo, Slackware, or FreeBSD, which, as far as I can figure, require you to be intimately aware of the architecture of your hardware down to the quantum level.
Slackware was my first attempt 3 years ago, on the above mentioned 486 and I had to know every aspect of every piece of hardware, as well as heads and cylinders on my HD.......awful stuff. That also doesn't include the formatting, which assumes you have a firm knowledge of Linux, and what it needs. I must give them credit, they tried to make it easy on the newbies, but they themselves said it was NOT a newbie distro.

I can't tell you why, but no other distro has EVER corrected guessed the make model and v&h sync of my cheapo off-brand 21" crt monitor.
Yeah, the Live CD even saw my Aureal Vortex......a soundcard almost EVERY distro does not support. (although I have seen 'hacked drivers' for Linux........) Even though it's not supported, it still knew what it was!

I suggest that you give these post install clean-up scripts a look.
There's that word again. Scripts seem to be a big part of Linux, that and compiling. It seems a very command-line affair to do anything to a Linux system. Is this a correct view? It seems that you don't install anything without the command-line. Perhaps I am overlooking something.

All in all, I am very tempted to just back up my personal stuff from windows, and wipe it clean......then do an install. I just hope I don't run into the partitioning headaches and the "it won't boot by itself' thing that also seems so common.