Hehe, I remember getting RH 6.1 and not understanding anything for 2 months. I just kept changing the GNOME theme and other trivial things. I think it's nice if you have a goal for Linux. That way you can feel you accomplished something and not end up a month later saying, "Linux sucks, I'm going back to Wintendo." Some goals I found useful: set up an ftp server so I can upload my work from school (no more floppies), learn to program, set up a firewall/masquarade (like Windows ICS) for your other computer, and run Unreal Tournament / Quake 3 (this actually used to be hard b/c Nvidia's drivers conflicted with another library).
Mandrake will baby you (relative to other distros) but it's ugly (this purple and yellow theme, you have user "icons" on graphical login, looks like AOLinux to me).
Red Hat is a step up but the compiler acts funny if you try to compile a 2.2.x kernel. If you don't know what this means, don't worry. You can eventually replace it after you install if you want to. IMPORTANT!!! Never ever install Red Hat's FTP or Bind (name server) servers. They are the buggiest pieces of junk and were responsible for the Worm a while back. Chances are you don't need Bind and proftpd is a much more secure replacement for RedHat's wu-ftpd.
SuSE is a mix between Drake and Red Hat. Drops the ugly stuff on Mandrake and drops RH's weird compiler. It's a very distro. I heard it actually installs the GeForce properly but I'm not too sure. Nvidia released some new drivers so you'll have update them anyway.
Whatever you do, the first thing you should do after installing is: turn off unnecessary services (in RH, run "setup" from the command line, run man <command> to see if you need to be running it, you do not need to run portmap or NFS; I don't know about other distro's), create a firewall (try firestarter, it's a GNOME app that builds firewalls for you), patch stuff (esp ftp, bind, Apache, and other services that you are still running).