Yeah, that might be an idea.
Ever tried *BSD? A bit different to Linux - I find the differences frustrating, but keep giving it a go when I get sick of distro-whoring - and its fun playing under the hood. I usually go for Debian and its satellite distros - I'm using Mepis again at the moment, which now has an Ubuntu [dapper] core instead of Debian testing - seems a little more stable now.
PCLinuxOS is worth a try - it can run as a live CD, originally was a fork from Mandrake but unusually uses apt-get as a package management tool with rpms... nice well integrated little distro for desktop use, check it out.
new question - do you reckon you could take fluorescent, without ginseng?