debian system :
xp 2800+
1 gig ram
prefetching etc on

Vmware running win2k. Will it bog the system down too much?
If so, would it help to use a more lightweight DE/WM other than Gnome, something like fluxbox maybe?

I don't think will have any problems, that system is quite capable of running vmware without any noticeable impact.
Just give vmware enough ram so it wont have to use disk cache.

I was thinking at one point of having a seperate login just using xwm to access the virtual machine, but then I thought I might as well dual boot then. Who knows, I'll give it a shot one of these days. From what I can remember I can go so far as to split what ram I have, 512 each for linux and the virtual machine. I've ran both on systems in that range, but I wonder about how well the processor will handle it. Just something like zsnes sitting ide on pause sucks up about 50% of my processor while I try to go on to other things.