I second the nomination for PCLinuxOS.  I tried the liveCD deal, loved it immediately.  Installed it toHD and still love it.  The only caveat(if that's the right word)  is I needed a hardwired nic card to initially get the synaptic manager to download the madwifi drivers and kernel sources in order to get my wireless card working. Other than that it installed with ease,and is very easy to navigate and configure.

Here's a thought,
  Just a heading for a section of the forum "Drop Box" , or something.  A Place where an inspired member could drop off either an article, or How-To or whatnot and let it be reviewed from there, or all the originating posts there could have a poll attached to them asking where users think they belong, or  if they should be stickied.  This way not only the administrators would get a say, nor have to necessarily take the time to review each separate post and make a decision.    Maybe 25, 100 , 500 or whatever.. votes and the topic is moved, if not by an admin beforehand(at the time of move voting no longer registers). It would be good if the topic itself wasn't moved, but Stickied into the appropriate child board, ie.."Articles","HowTo's","Rants", or whatever,   I don't know if this type of automation exists in the forum software, but I would bet most anything that Skrommel could script it.
 If nothing else a centrally accessible place for members and admins to review and comment on articles, reviews, howTo's and the like would take some of the strain off managing your time. An active topic or really good how-to becomes sticky, or gets sent to a sidebar in the front page, or ends up creating it's own child board, or finally ends up dying out and ends up in a "Top Threads of All Times" locked archive. 
  Anyway just a few ideas to play with, I'm rambling now so I'll leave it there and see where it all goes (Oh Yeah, I almost forgot.  Trash Bin should probably not be included in the poll options  ;-)   )

Thanks all, one of the questions about slipstreaming that I would like more info on is the types of things that can be slipstreamed.  It seems like the sites I have searched mainly focus on Service Packs and drivers.  Is it possible to slipstream applications pre-installed into the "program Files" directory,start menu and registry as though they were part of the operating system themselves...ie; like putting firefox in place of msie and having the os just accept it as the webbrowser that is available.
  Another thing that I can't seem to get away with is removing msie using XPlite.  There is always something that won't work correctly if it's not there. 
 I am working with a laptop with a PIII-800 and 512mb. ram I an kind of leary to install VMware onto it because it just seems as though it would be really slow and tedious to work with, on that note it may be worth it if VMware could make an image that would install onto a partition and not think it was still a VMware system.
  I will check out the links and info suggested and see what I find