Yeh knoppix is pretty awesome hardware polling in Linux is unrivaled so I think a Knopix cd would be invaluable for trouble shooting and if you can find a friendly place a great thing to do with a shared pc. Knoppix can be bloated for older computer but there are many alternatives notably thebootable business card
Gentoo.org says they paln to be breating some new life into cygwin, also doing a Mac OS X ports project. I read a thread elswhere about a windows software program damaging important file. Man I don't envy you guys. For all the user unfriendliness-ness of Linux I sure am happ