Puppy linux is small and tries to load itself all up in memory to free the CD drive. It's bound to be quick if it manages to load entirely. I'd try that at least on box 1 and 2

use IceWM, it's the most windows-like window manager after KDE, and tons lighter. e.g., http://download.freshmeat.net/screenshots/32951.png

Same here except I run Enlightenment 0.16.7.1 and it runs well. In fact, I have two SETI@Home clients running in the background just to keep the box busy.

Music playback with XMMS is great and web surfing with Mozilla, Opera, and IE (via wine) is also fantastic. I have a cable modem at home and performance is excellent. Flash, Java applets, etc., all work flawlessly.

I agree with the others, it's not which distro you use but what apps and daemons you run that are important to you.

Good luck!

Peace...

Suse can be perfectly fast on a slow machine.
Likewise, Slackware can be dog-slow on a 3.2Ghz dual Pentium Xeon.

It all comes down to:

1. What services (daemons) you're running
2. How much eye candy you enable
3. Which desktop environment you choose
4. Which applications you intend to run
5. Whether you optimize Xfree86/Xorg to be accelerated or not

and so on and so forth.

It really is NOT distribution-specific, as others have already mentioned. If you pull a Beavis and install EVERYTHING in Suse, Mandriva, or Fedora, it is going to be PAINFULLY slow to boot, and even worse to run applications on.

If you do a minimal install or a custom install, putting ONLY the stuff you need on, then recompile X for acceleration, it's going to likely be faster than an equivalent Windows 98 configuration.

I am going to completely disagree with this.
I ran a home server with Debian Woody for quite some time. Pentium 100, 64MB RAM, minimal Debian install and apt-get Apache and the few things I wanted installed. It ran very nicely.
As I wanted to try using PHP-Nuke I decided it would be easier to use a more up to date Suse 9.1 and I could also try out YAST vs apt for text install server.
I could not even install Suse without first creating and initializing a swap partition. Many parts of the install took "forever". I did a minimal Suse install and used YAST to add about the same packages that I was running under Debian. Many of Yast's functions took many minutes to complete.
Accessing a straight HTML webpage was slightly sluggish but not bad.
My opinion is that YAST eats a huge amount of resources that Debian does not. On a slow PC this means running more sluggish at best, unacceptably slow at worse. My overall opinion was unacceptably slow.
IMO a SUSE text install does not equal a Debian text install. (I do rate a Debian or Slackware text install as similar.)
I was surprised by this.
I do like using SUSE as my desktop and am running the current 9.3 while having problems installing Debian Sarge.
Such is life...

Well, I know that many will disagree but I would suggest you stick with win98. Really I cant imagine you having so many problems with spyware. At work I have about 150 98 and xp machines to deal with and while it is a problem, its not THAT big. And viruses should be even less of a problem as 98 is pretty much a dead platform. Most viruses are targeted for XP/2000 these days.

Performance wise, win98 can be customised too to squeeze out a little more performance. There are tools around to remove unnecessary bloat.
I'm only telling this because I am sure you'll get a lot of flaming for discomforting people. And believe me no matter how good your intentions are or how right you may be about linux being a good choice for rudimentary office tasks (I mean it really is as easy as win in this respect), people just dont like change for no apparent reason.

I'm no linux expert but I would find the task of making that 233Mhz/64Mb machine running smoothly a challenge. I like gnome and KDE but they are both slow, so they are probably not a good choice. How do the other desktop envirronments compare visually and functionally?

Hey,

Don't forget to let us know how you fared. Which distro worked for you and all these things ok ? Yeah I know, that's nosy but I assume.

Well, I guess I'm doing what bspus suggested, keeping it the way it has always been...
I might set up a mchine with vectorlinux, so that if all the machines are being used or one of them is down, the employees can use it, and get used to it...
The hardest part would be convincing the boss... He would probably ask "What's the advantage" and I'd tell him and he would say it's good enogh the way it is...
Stubborn people.

The problem with change for reason that people don't understand is that it makes them feel stupid and ignorant and patronised. You have to wait till they ask for a way out... 90% of PC users have not asked yet ;-)