Nix on an ancient laptop.
 

Got an old Thinkpad T20. Awesome 700mhz Pent. 3. 128mb ram and Win 98. Also has one of those mouse pointer dots in the middle of the keyboard (hopefully default support in the distro). The thing is loaded with old junk and I am honestly to lazy to bother cleaning it properly. The expected result is nothing more than a dvd player to be plugged into a projector. Is there a distro I can install that is mostly idiot proof to use, very low overhead resource use... Sleek and fast, moron proof. HELP MEH PLZ!

I had a similar laptop given to me about a year ago. I just threw Slackware on it, and everything worked off the flop - no serious tweaking.

That little mouse-nipple which you refer to, acts just like a typical track-pad; at this point, there shouldn't be a modern Linux distribution that does not support it (excluding embedded and specialty distributions, of course).

Mind you, Slackware is not for the faint of heart. If you would like something pretty fool-proof, on that older hardware, I highly suggest Vector Linux.

I set up an almost identical machine with ubuntu for a friends daughter. Has been a good machine for her for about a year. Things just worked right 'out of the box'. Give it a try. If you run into a snag, post back.

You might like to consider/try "Lubuntu" or "Igelle".

Slitaz
 

Get Puppy Linux or Slitaz

128mb ram is the main issue. If you could raise that alot that would help. Until then you are stuck with very basic distro's like Puppy, DSL.