Actually, I got to thinkin about another way to do what I need and figure I'll bounce it off you cats.

My current XP office machine and all it's damned XP required programs all exist on its C Drive, right? How about just removin the drive and poppin it into the new Ubuntu machine and then simply using a dual boot set up to log into Ubuntu for email and web surfin then log outta Ubuntu and boot into the XP system as needed for the MS only programs, which really isn't all that often.

The XP system already has IE disabled, at least as well as I can, and the XP system will really need no web access, so I figure if I just uninstall the Firefox and Opera browsers it now has, that should keep it off the web for good, right? Or would I need to just fark up the network setting to insure it just CAN NOT get on the web at all?

I'm not well versed enough in XPs intricasies to know if there are any hidden snags or tricks I'd need to do for this to work, so anyone know if this is really as simple as it sounds or is there some big whammy just waitin for me if I try and do it this way?

I've fiddled with Wine a few times but never had a lot of success with it and sure don't wanna risk totally snockerin my XP data. Whatever I do really needs to be as safe as possible since blowin up my bookkeeping program, customer/vendor database, etc. would be disasterous.

If anyone has any ideas or could point me in the direction to find out more about all this, it would be a big help