Ok. Im gonna end up getting counterstrike (ancient i know) to work with it. So that is a definite must have. So opengl is a must have.
Large support for the os is a must have as I am a newbie. I know some stuff but that is it.
As for useability, I want to be able to use it more than xp... just make it easy. I know the hard part is getting everything to work correctly then it runs on its own. I want to make this as painless as possible.
My wife.... well, she aint exactly into learning new stuff when it comes to change she hates it. So, I have to pick something and keep it there. I can justify the change because of the Warez i have on my pc now.... i have to get rid of them. I want to be totally legitimate. So Linux is the affordable way...
Someone give me the best choice for me and their thoughts on why.

I have read up on these different ones...
Red hat supposedly the most stable (I have a copy of RH9 right here next to me in the back of my linux for dummies book)
Suse the more i read... the better it looks
Debian from what i hear is a bit harder to learn. and not so freindly to the newbie
Slackware i read one article... dont know too much
Mandrake I tried it before... had a bunch of trouble...

Now, Here is my rig... obviously the most important part of getting an os to work is building it around the hardware...

Barton 2500
Asus A7N8X Deluxe ( I use the onboard sound and lan)
Maxtor 80 Gig 8 Meg Cache HDD ( partitioned 1 xp and 1 for linux)
512 Buffalo Ch5 PC 3200
Ati Radeon 9700 Pro

I will need some assistance with the lan I am sure... but we will get there later. Help a bro out if you can..

if you or your wife don't want to learn a lot of new stuff, stick with the more "windows-like" distros. since you had trouble with mandrake before, RH (now called Fedora for the desktop version) wouldn't be a bad choice. there's tons of red hat users and support -- their docs tend to be really good, too, from the ones i've read.

slackware is arguably the best distro <pls, no flames> but it doesn't sound like it would be best for your needs. same for debian. SuSE might be okay, but for some reason i didn't like it. if you have a good feeling for it, it definitely would be worth a try, though. otherwise, i would go with the RH9 disk you already have, or Fedora, http://fedora.redhat.com/ you should have no hardware trouble with any distro with the components you listed. gl

what about my onboard nic? i hear of alot of people having trouble setting up the onboard lan on my nforce2 board... any suggestions there? just in case tho... i have an extra dlink nic i can use.... i just dont want to have to..

my rig: barton 2500, epox 8rda+ (nforce2), 512 buffalo tech, ati 8500le, onboard lan, maxtor hd, turtle beach sound card: no troubles. the nvidia drivers are extremely easy to setup.

I'd say you should go with the RH.
- you have the CD in hand,
- the install is as easy as any other (IMHO)
- lots of rpm packages so it's easy to add stuff later
(without having to know what's really going on),
- probably the biggest user base (in US anyway)
so easy to find someone to ask questions when they come up,

I've installed all kinds of distros on all kinds of onboard NICs. I've not had a problem with them getting identified. Onboard sound and video are sometimes more of a challenge than the NICs. There's pretty broad NIC support in most distros these days. I wouldn't worry.