Well I don't really need this OOo thingy, I take it that's a presentation type thing.
OOo is OpenOffice.org, a functional equivalent to MS-Office. The components are: OO Writer - Word replacement OO Calc - Excel replacement OO Impress - PowerPoint replacement.
Wife is locked into power point as that's what they can run at her work and she has only just started using a computer so is not going to want to learn anything else as well.
If your wife looked over my shoulder while I was using OO Impress, she might mistake it for PowerPoint - that's how similar they are. Having said that, if someone is mentally locked into a particular app, it won't matter how good OOo is - she'll hate it regardless, so I won't push it any further.
She can keep using my 466 xp based machine and I will do my browsing and mail and stuff on the old 333 if and when I can get something running on it to replace my old 98SE.
Ubuntu comes in several flavours, one of which is Xubuntu which might have a less bloated graphical desktop than either Gnome or KDE. If you disable all the eye-candy (eg make it look more like 98SE than XP) then it should run okay. Nearly all linux desktops have a "start" menu button in the bottom left corner, just like windows has, so you'll be able to use your computer like you always have. Yuri
