[masraum]

Chris, I believe you should be able to map the DOS drives to knoppix, but it's been a while since i tinkered, so hopefully one of the other fellas will give you the specifics.

VMWare rocks. If you get a Linux session running in VMWare you can map your Windows partitions, put files in them, and then they are accessible in your host OS.

Linux is much more secure than Windows if you take some time to make it that way. Some distributions can leave lots of open ports during install. Getting a firewall running on the box is a good idea on any OS.