I am a Linix distro uhhhh, "tester". I have tried many available distros fairly recently on three AMD64 939s setups, looking for a distro that installs and leaves a clean, organized desktop, easy to use for my wife so she can get off the Micro$oft merry-go-round. Next is a new Dual Opteron box ready to go!!
I did finally get Linspire downloaded. If the download is going REAL slow, as mine did you need to go into your router and/or firewall and open up some ports. I didn't get squat for speed on a 3Mps connection. I opened some ports and speed quickly ramped up to a max of 375Kps download. Look at the docs, I think the ports needed for bittornado started at 6881. I changed the router too. I tried to download SUSE 10 to test out the torrent and after 24hrs I only was getting 10-30k down, but more than that up for others. I gave up on it. I am warnig you bittornado will slow your PC to a crawl. I left it run for 24hrs after my download finished to help others and this old box crawled.
My VERY brief look of Linspre was ok so far, not too bloated, looks like windows, but it reminded you that it is NOT free with yearly Click and Run update fees. If you have a PC to do a clean install, Linspire is very easy to install. Xandros seemed ok, but had $$$ ads everywhere, no thanks. I will donate/pay something for the version I select, but I want to try them and decide on my own first.
So far, I recommend two Linux distros. Ubuntu Hoary installs very clean and works well, IF you are willing to tweak and apt-get needed pieces. For example, I added Thunderbird and got Tunderbird imported files from Outlook Express and it worked well but took some work. Ubuntu works well, and I have it almost 100% the way I want it, but I recently got a few flakey video issues, grrrr. It was ok afteards though. I really wish Ubuntu could get the AMD64 64bit version would set up as well as the 32bit. The 64bit needs a few apps like flash so web pages look nice, etc for the family. Mepis is currently my other choice (32-bit), it can run form the CD or install on the hard disk and is also fairly fast too. It comes set up with good software, but I feel the KDE menues and buttons are not as well organized as Ubuntu's Gnome setup. I'd tweak KDE a little bit for home/family use. There are other "smaller" distros for older PCs too if you spen some time and look around, like on distrowatch.com.