It's been a long time coming,(more than 5 years), but I've finally found a desktop distro that works seamlessly with my hardware and allows me to do everything I could do in Windows.
It was shear chance that I bought a magazine with Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Live on the cover and decided to give it a run.
I was decidedly impressed and so installed it on my hard drive's Linux space in place of Debian, which I felt had had a good innings.
From that time, more than 6 months ago now, I have used Mandriva exclusively, never once booting into Windows.
So with the release of Mandriva 2009, I have formatted my hard drive and given the whole 120Gb over to Mandriva.
And so my migration to Linux has happened at last.
May I offer a big thankyou to the Mandriva team; keep up the good work.