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No one here has mentioned Pardus Linux so I will. I tried out quite a few distros last fall when deciding to migrate from Vista. The three I found most user friendly for someone new to Linux were Pardus 2009.1, Mint 8 and Mandriva 2010. They were easy to install, set up and run, and offered proprietary drivers for my NVIDIA graphics and Gemteck wireless cards. I found that the more established distros such as SuSe, and Fedora did not offer such support and I had to do some hunting to find appropriate drivers.

Pardus is not a small distro like Puppy or DSL so would probably not suit Eric’s needs, although it can be slimmed down some. I have read that it may be a bit difficult to uninstall KDE and replace it with the desktop of your choice because KDE is more integrated into Pardus than into other distros. I have seen discussions in the forums by users who have installed Gnome or the smaller desktops and they have mentioned no great problems. Pardus has been successfully installed on USB sticks and there are instructions in the wiki. Pardus uses Grub 2 and Ext 4 by default, but you can replace these with the bootloader and files system of your choice.

If you want to learn Linux, as Richard has said he does, I would suggest any distro based on Slackware, such as Salix, or build your own from scratch. You will not have a working distro right away so will need to dual boot with a working OS.

The O’Reilly “in a nutshell” series of books is a good set of reference works. There are probably other good ones out there, as well.

My best advice is what others have said: try out a bunch of different distros on live CDs or USBs and go with the one that feels right for you.

Hope that helps.