I'm a complete Linux newbie, but am keen to join the club. Right now, my PC is running on Windows XP with a SATA drive.

As I am new to Linux and just want to experiment, would it work to buy a small IDE hard drive (for Linux) to use alongside the SATA one? WOuld this work as a dual boot system? I dont really want to tamper with my Windows disk and its partitions but also dont want to buy another 80GB SATA drive just for Linux (perhaps eventually I will want to, but for now I just want to learn

Also, I am still not sure which distro is best for a complete beginner. ANy thoughts? Cheers.

Yes that should be fine, (abotu a second hard drive)

there are TONS of threads about the distro questoin, do a quick search and you will find dozens.

RedHat9 and Mandrake9.1 are usually the two most recommended, although you should try out knoppix, to test out what it can feel like

Wich distro, eh?
A boxed set of one of the major distros (Mandrake or Suse, Redhat will not produce further consumer/personal versions) is a good start. You can also often download the ISOs needed to install a test version for free. The download versions are the same or similar to the boxed sets.
If you have a slow internet connection or just don't want to fool with it, download versions can be purchased cheaply at various places like:
http://www.linuxcentral.com/_v3/
The run from CD with no hard drive install Knoppix version is good to try.
Good Luck.

another good place to find linux distros is on ebay, they are nornally about £2-£5 but it would probbaly cost you that much in electricty if you have a slow connection