I have a P4 at 1.7 Ghz, 512Mb of DDR RAM, a new Western Digital 160 HDD (which i set as master) an older IBM 40GB HDD (now set to slave that has Windows XP Pro installed on it) ...
I installed freespire 2.0 completely without any problems, i gave it 160gigs on the new harddrive but when the computer restarted it froze right at the beginning of the splash screen. I tried to reinstall (and all the other options on the cd) but the installation now freezes a few seconds after the splash screen comes up. I tried to boot up into windows, but nothing i did would let me. I ended up having to let windows rewrite the mdr just so it would load, but right before the logon screen is supposed to come up it just restarts ... I ended up having to reinsall windows over the 160gb linux drive, now i cant even see the G: drive (which linux reassigned to the old windows) however, i can see the other two NTFS partitions on that drive (still E: and F: )

What i really want to do is completely get rid of windows and move to linux (I'm sick and tired of all its problems) but it seems that isnt going to be as easy as i thought. I'm a somewhat savy windows user but i'm brand new to linux. I tried to install linux again but it still freezes on the splash screen every time. can anyone help me or give me any suggestions? did i do something wrong?

Are you sure there aren't any problems with your hardware, such as a bad RAM stick or that you're overclocking without knowing it?

Also, have you tried booting with any options, such as noapic or noacpi ? That's one of the first things to try if it's locking up like that, in my experience.

nothing has been overclocked, i know that ... i ran a memory test with grub and it passed 100% ... but i havn't tried any special booting options ... are they located in bios or do i need to get to a command prompt?

Usually, most distributions will tell you to hit enter to install, or an (F) key for other options. When you select the proper (F) key you'll get a boot prompt where you can enter a kernel parameter such as:
linux noacpi
Or:
linux rescue
Look around at those (F) options when you first boot the CD to find other options, one of which would be the command to do a text installation without graphics till you can install proper graphics driver after the OS is up in command line only. You may be able to find the right command to instruct the installer to use the proper open source graphics driver. Because it sounds like a graphics issue, what type of graphics do you have?
What may be too obvious, is that they (different operating systems), all have their quirks and their advantages.