Good news on the emulation front; Plex86, which aims to become a free
VMWare-like virtual-PC program for Linux,
now boots Linux normally.
Granted, Linux on Linux is not particularly impressive from a practical
point of view, but it's a step to running Windows on Linux, not sacrificing
having a
real OS on the machine. Meanwhile, Windows emulator WINE
allegedly
runs Word/Excel 2000 on Linux. No Internet Exploiter though.