WHich is easier to use for a person crossing over from Windows XP?

id have to say mandrake but only if you get a powerpack that comes with the commercial video drivers

It's true the PowerPacks are nicer as it's 100% ready out of the box, rather than having to spend a little bit of time downloading the free drivers, flash plugins etc, and following the many help threads to install them easily. For a first time used go with the support and all in the box option, and you can move on as you get used to using linux.

Buy some cheap CD-R's and download the free versions or the live-cd's first and try them. This will give you a better way to see which one is for you. You can also check out other distro's. Find the one you like and then buy the boxed version, you get the book for a quick reference guide (help support the software developers)
I find Mandrake easier for newbie's, but Suse is a little ahead of Mandrake.

SuSE.......but i'm biased.
mandrake has issues with their servers going down,and having to chase dependencies down.
suse is slow to update packages,and tends to break things with every kde upgrade (3 kde upgrades and the same audio issue comes up everytime).
both default to kde for a gui and offer gui-based package tools for adding and removing software.

Things like the one which will be easiest in terms of getting dependencies is the one I am looking for.

Where can one get this power pack?

if you are only choosing between those 2 i would sugest SuSe as MDK has a major habbit of breaking things in its own OS when it does updates. that and the fact that the updates can take forever to connect to. last time i ran MDK10 it litterally took 10 days before i was able to connect to their update server and then when it finnaly did connect it killed the OS to the point it was no longer bootable.

needless to say for a newbie i would sujest the older RH9, or newer FC(fedora core)3.

you get stability, fast releases, easy to find dependancies, the access to YUM or apt-get, or up2date for updates/upgrades and the GUI install is so simple that if you can install windows you can install FC. to top it off FC has better hardware detection then both MDK and SuSe from what i have seen with my odd ball hardware on my laptop.

wanted to add a note about SuSe 9.2. this is a much better installer then the one for 9.0. the default install is just like a windows install but you have no choice over the packages it installs. this is great for a true linux newbie as you can not screw things up. once you get more comfortable with the way linux and more specifically SuSe works you can go back and start over from scratch and do a manual install and pick and chose the packets you want on the system to really clean up all the junk that you do not need/want.