Very helpful and detailed enough to get me
started without, hopefully, having to ask any other questions that
are patently obvious to everyone else here.

I'm assuming that I can try out these programs and then uninstall
without causing the weirdness that seems to occur in Windows, where
my machine often seems to be somehow compromised (develops odd tics,
error messages etc) by uninstalling programs?

Your *aside also saved me from asking the other newbie question
about desktop managers. One thing that attracted me to Ubuntu was
the desktop images on the site. I have some visual issues and found
it very clean looking as well as more aesthetically pleasing than
my two options on XP.

I'll wait until I actually get my disc before asking any questions
that using it may answer for me. Again, thank you for your patient
answer.