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You can try out VIA C3 or Eden based solutions such as this one: http://www.computergate.com/products/item.cfm?prod cd=B7VEPIACL6
VIA http://www.via.com.tw/ makes excellent fanless CPUs and motherboards from 400Mhz upto 1+Ghz

Do I go with a full distro that has everything and a jar of pickles or do I go with something lighter? More stuff, or less filling? Great taste or difficult installation?

My last pieces arrive today from computergate.com. I bought a case, mb, amd 2500xp and a dozen hard drive racks. Yes, a dozen. At 6.95 each (including both internal frame and actual drive housing) it was cheap and just takes the space of a cdrom. Now I have them setup on the box ready for OS testing. I have several old and some newer drives (3 x 1.6gb, a 20, a few 40s, 60, 10s, etc.) Now I just pop in a hard drive and boot up. I tested this on my 1700, and already have 98/2k dualboot, rh9, slack, bsd, gentoo, xp, and a few purely testing RH hard drives. Just shut down, swap out, and boot again. One platform to get drivers for, one monitor, one keyboard, lots of older parts. I also installed an extra ata controller, and put the cdburner as sec. master, so i have four masters and I can mount up to 2 other drives, mount and repair if I need to, using one of the 3 hd racks. Being all masters, I don't have to change jumpers.

This may seem like overkill, but actually its alot easier and faster for testing, debugging, experimenting and just having fun. Also, at $6.95 ($5.95 if you buy 4+) its also a cheap way to put those old hard drives to use. They have more expensive ones, but these were just fine and ATA133 compatible, including a built in HD fan. Even has a crappy lock/key.

The Case is a mini itx case with a fan blow hole drilled and a low profile (probably U1) heatsink for the chip.

A motherboard that supports P4s in the mini-itx form can be found here, however I don't know any resellers... google it.

The rest is just laptop parts, but I really don't trust a 55W powersuply on a P4 so you might want to replace it with one here. My guess is that it will end up being $600-700 in parts so think about $1000 retail.

See the mythv web page for more info on what it can do.

Computergate usually has very low prices, but you need to know what you're getting. For instance for a brand name motherboard you'll do fine, and returns have never been a problem in my experience. They do have some no-brand cards and memory and cases that I've generally had good luck with - but not perfect luck.

WinModems? They're much cheaper than that.

$10 for Intel chipset (not bad - I've used this one).
or about $3 for a $hitty HSP56 micromodem (for which I refuse to give a link, as it is such a pathetic product)

A penny apiece.

GOOD High School labor? $6 by 5 minutes.

$6 / 12 = $0.50

So you're already up around $2. Right in the same ballpark.

(Incidentally, I get mine pre-made for less than $1 each from my favorite vendor.)

Not so obviously. I upgraded my brother's PC two weeks ago, buying parts from my favorite online vendor. He's not a power user by any stretch (and in fact only upgraded from his K6-200 because it died on him). I spec'd a 900 MHz Duron (for the good price/performance) for $61. Before I finalized the order, I thought I'd check on what the T-Birds were going for. 900 MHz T-Bird: $59. I thought it was screwy, but I didn't complain.