Are there any wireless cards that work plug and play style? Without having to install any drivers. I have a Dell with the Intel 3945 mini wireless card but for a newbie like me the instructions at sourceforge.net for compiling and what not are very intimidating and i don't want to mess up the computer. I already have some space allocated on my harddrive for a linux distrobution but I haven't decided which either. And I dont believe I can go with a live distro. Thank you for your time.

You won't mess up your computer. It's normal to be intimidated by the instructions like those for compiling a driver from source code, but there's plenty of help. The Intel driver docs will give you the proverbial step-by-step, even if you don't understand the steps.

All wireless will require some effort on your part, although it may be masked by virtue of a GUI. If you want to succeed with Linux, assume that you'll have to venture outside of your comfort zone and look at/do things differently than in Windows.

If all you want to do is have it "just work" to be able to say you're using Linux, find an old ORiNOCO card. Most distros will find it and load the driver, although you'll still have to configure the wireless parameters.

Try Ubuntu Desktop (live CD). It's renowned for its ability to discover and configure components, and you can test it to see if your card will work. Also, the Ubuntu community is strong and I'll bet there's a pre-compiled binary for the Intel card.