I spent a couple of weeks working on moving my desktop over to windows. My suggestion to you is to get Crossover Office. Yes, it costs money, but it really does work well, and you're helping support Wine development. I'm currently running Office, Quicken, and even Photoshop quite well, although Photoshop still has problems (on the other hand, its not officially supported). Also, VMware works relatively well for all other applications, although its annoying to use and expensive. Also, I suggest upgrading to KDE 3.1rc5 which is really quite good, and also get gaim 0.60 (the current CVS). Both are quite stable, and both are very good improvements over the previous versions. Gaim especially looks a lot better, although there are still some things I miss from Trillian, but on the other hand, Gaim has its own features that Trillian doesn't have. Finally, you should also grab Geramik to make everything have one theme (if you plan to use KDE). Also, if you like Mandrake, consider purchasing a subscription to Mandrake Club - you get commercial software packaged as well as supporting a Linux distribution and having the chance to have a say in the development of Mandrake 9.1
Hope this helps,
David Levitan