I cannot recommend Slackware enough. It is THE shiznit!
Seriously. I run Slackware 9.1 at home and also on my laptop at work under VMware. It's faster and more stable than Redhat 8 and 9, Fedora, SuSE, and many others.
If I had to pick a second place contender I would tell you to pick up SuSE 9.0 pro. It's awesome. It's just a bit bloated and slow for me.
I think it's just because it's hard to go back to other Distro's after using Slackware
I tried Gentoo, and didn't like it. I don't like Mandrake at all, and the last thing I really really liked from Redhat was 7.3.
Plus, with Slackware having the most posts of any distro, I'd say you'll get more support here for Slack than anything else.
Go Slack....
My
Whitehat