"I found it slow for the first minute or so until it gets iteself together properly, then it speeds up and runs at native speed"

Hmm, I had left it running but then, as they say, "your mileage may vary."

"What I like is that I can have an NT box, a 98 box and a (separate) Linux box ALL running simultaneously, all talking over the net and all completely unaware of the other VMs."

That is cool and it was what had me tempted to buy it. But, in the end, I decided that realistically what I needed on a day to day basis was what Win4Lin could offer at about a third of the price.

"What hardware are you using ? My Linux distie is SuSe 8.1 2.4.19 kernel"

I'm on Redhat 7.3 with 2.4.20. I originally was at 2.4.18 but I upgraded to 2.4.20 to get ACPI support on my laptop.

"Me: I was truly quite worried about what would happen if that file got corrupted.
You: I think you would be screwed, but the same goes for any windows box "

True, although my concern was that if a file gets corrupted on a native file system you can generally just kiss that individual file goodbye rather than, essentially, your entire NT or Win98 partition. I.e., it seems you're putting all your eggs (enitre VM partition) in one basket (one file) with the VM approach whereas with Win4Lin it works with Linux' native file system. So if a file goes bad, a file goes bad--not the entire "partition."

I also like the fact that I can just "cd" into my Windows partition from Linux and that I can map Linux directories as Windows "maps" without having to run Samba.

Anyway, like I said, VMWare is a great product. I almost bought it--and still might in the future. But I decided, realistically, I'm not going to be running a couple of versions of Windows, plus Linux, plus another version of Linux within VMWare. So my needs just lead me to the conclusion that Win4Lin was right for me. If my needs were slightly different I would've gone with VMWare.

Regards,
Craig Steiner