Thanks Shikamaru, your advice actually saved me some time I believe. What got me looking into Linux was that Sunday night my old puter blew up...finally. Had to get a new one. I used my son's laptop in the in-between time, which has Windows 7. Quite honestly W7 impressed me. One of the things that impressed me was using my standard privacy enhancements, absolutely zero cookies or LSO's were being dropped on the machine. Quite honestly I like W7 better than XP (never thought I would say such a thing). Then I got looking into Linux a little closer and ran into this video on YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkgahANeq14. The title of the video is Linux Sucks.
Basically the presentation makes the case that Linux will never get any better because of the lack of profit. That the troubles Linux has had, at the desktop level they have been facing for 10 years, and the problems never get straightened out.
So, if I decide to play around with Linux, your suggestion of using Virtualbox seems like the best play.