I tried Linux Mint not too long ago (I've tried a number of different distros just for the heck of it); it was nice, though my preferred (non-LFS) distro of the moment is Xubuntu. Just like Ubuntu, for the most part, but it uses the Xfce desktop environment, which tends to be relatively fast and is rather more forgiving of older hardware than GNOME and KDE. There's a "Community Edition" ISO of Linux Mint with Xfce, and the final, stable release for version 6 should be out by now.

As for using LFS to learn your way around Linux, it's not necessarily a bad way to begin, though having *some* degree of familiarity with how things work (command line behavior, filesystem manipulation, and other Prerequisites) is of course recommended. LFS admittedly requires a good deal of patience for first-time builders of any proficiency level - even so-called Linux "experts" - but particularly for those coming from other OSes.

Anyway, good luck starting over and let us know if you have any more problems. Thankfully, using the LiveCD will take at least some of the guesswork out of the process: when troubleshooting, it's harder to blame the host!