Here is another thought...I just did this at home and it is working quite well. I have Win2000 Pro, which is nice and stable. I then put Cygwin on my machine. Tons of stuff has been ported to Cygwin, like KDE, Gnome, gimp, Perl, CVS etc. I have ssh running, Apache, Perl, etc. It is great. I get to use all the Windows programs I like, and when I need something Unix style, I just launch a Cygwin shell and go to work. I have set-up shortcuts on my desktop to lauch rxvt terminals, an Xserver interface, KDE...the possibities are relly endless.

I have started to do the same with my work machine, and since Xfree86 has been ported to Cygwin, I was able to dump Xwin32. The installation is pretty painless.