I haven't messed with any distro of Linux for about 3 years now, but I am looking to install it at home again.  My only concern is running Quickbooks - my understanding is that it won't run under Wine for some reason, and I know it requires IE to run also.  

Any recommendations on distributions and Windows emulation solutions?  I am reasonably computer savvy, I was a systems engineer in a past life, so something I can fine tune would be nice.  I'm not into building kernals and such, however.  

You might try Linspire OS, it is the one specifically designed to replace XP.  I don't know for a fact, but I would suspect, that the user group would be able to tell you whether Quickbooks will work.

How dumb of Quickbooks to rely on a 3rd party OS component that might be broken with any given security update?

Jim

Quoted: How dumb of Quickbooks to rely on a 3rd party OS component that might be broken with any given security update? Jim

Agreed.  I wonder if someone on Sourceforge has a nice open source replacement for Quickbooks that could read Quickbooks files?  THAT would be an awesome app.