How well would an kubuntu distributuin (the appliance) run in vmware player on
Windows XP, P4 2.6c, 2gb memory.

Is it worth trying?
If I wasn't running much (or anything) on the windows side when I started it up, would I see close to the naitive performance on that hardware? I want to make the linux switch, but I want to test the waters first.
-Mike

It would run pretty well. I run Windows 2000 in vmware from Linux on a 3.2GHz P4 with 1gb ram.

I'd recommend not using vmware player. You won't get a decent graphical resolution or colour. To get that, use vmware workstation and install vmware tools after you've installed Linux (in the virtual machine). It just takes a few clicks, no need to download anything.

Well, there may be a virtual machine (Ubuntu) out there that the creator has already installed VMWare tools. I know there are a couple different VM's of Ubuntu on the Vmware site, look for one that says VMWare Tools Installed.

Like dinolinux said, you will get better performance with VMWare Tools installed.

But on to the question if it will run nice. I have had three different VmWare virtual machines running using VMWare Player at the same time on my WinXPPro/2Gig ram laptop, with very little performance issues. I did install these VM's myself, and installed VMWare Tools on each one.