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Wine + /dev/ttyUSBX ;)

this page has a great walkthrough of how to accomplish it. It's the USB->Serial drivers that suck, not the devices themselves. Use a properly stable and functioning OS and drivers, and you don't run into those issues nearly as often.

1) I can already check my email on an exchange server using mutt, kmail, or the mail reader of your choice. (Exchange supports IMAP just fine). If you want to get rid of exchange, there's alternatives for that too: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/16/ 1422209
2) You'll have to specify which version of Microsoft Office the boss' boss has; without that info, I can't even accomplish this task with powerpoint in windows. If you drop the "flawless" requirement, then OpenOffice will work just fine. Otherwise, I would highly recommend a PDF instead, as it comes with a much higher guarantee of rendering correctly.
3) I've never worked at a company that had shelled out the $4k or so for MS Project server, but I grant that such might exist. For those companies, they are indeed stuck trying to integrate with that single product, and I highly doubt they would ever consider moving to open source anyway. If project management is the goal as opposed to integrating with MS servers, there's plenty of options. KPlato looks decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_manag ement_software
4) Change your payroll software. Seriously, very few websites these days require activex. Alternately you could install IE and ActiveX in linux. It takes a bit of work, but any reasonably competent IT worker should be able to add it to their standard linux desktop image. http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/activex-linux.php
5) Corporations generally have network printers, which have worked with linux for years. If all you have are printers connected to windows computers, CUPS can deal with that too.

In summary, if you are willing to consider alternatives rather than blindly demanding compatibility with MS products, there's nothing holding a corporate environment back.

Have a look here: http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/raid-lvm.php

Raid5 + LVM allowed me to use different sized disks and create a fully redundant array of the whole thing and have it appear as a single volume.

If you use a filesystem that supports resizing (like ReiserFS for example), you can increase your array without even taking it offline!

Having recently set up a file server I feel somewhat qualified to respond to this.
What you want to do is the following:
Set up a GNU/Linux box, (whatever flavour you choose doesn't really matter all that much - I chose Ubuntu 6.04 because it's got a long support life)
next, get two or more big fat Seagate SATA drives
E.g. Seagate SATAII NCQ 320GB 7200RPM with a 16mb Cache are close to the sweet spot in terms of cost per GB (anout AU$105 each here in Australia) and have a 5 year warranty.
Why Seagate? Just my preference due to their being quiet, having had minimal problems with them in the past, and having decent warranties. last time I bought Western digital drives a couple of years ago I found them a bit noisy, though that might have changed.

next, partition your drives into small partitions - say, 4 partitions.

Make each corresponding set of partitions on a drive a raid set ( raid 1 if only 2 drives, raid 5 if 3 or more). the idea is that partition 1 from each drive will make up RAID set 1, partition 2 from each drive will make up RAID set 2, etc.
Set up LVM over the top of this, to tie each of the 5 sets of partitions into one logical volume that can then be repartitioned to your hearts content to suit your requirements

The problem with just traditional RAID partitions is that you cant resize them without reformatting.
by having small sets of raid partitions, you can easily add more drives in the future, to add capacity without having to wipe everything.
If you want to extend the set in teh future, you do the following:
1) add extra drive, partitioned the same as the other drives.
2) free up 1 raid set's worth of space from the LVM set.
3) use LVM's management tools (pvmove, vgreduce and vgrmove) to tell it to stop using that raid set.
4) tear down that raid set, and use the now unused partitions plus one from the new drive to build a new RAID set.
5) tell LVM to use the newly created RAID set (pvcreate, vgextend)
6) repeat from step 2, for the next Raid set, until you have all the partitions from the new drive included.

you can even write a script to do all this. I'm sure theres been a post on slashdot about this in the past.
The expansion process wont be fast, but it will eliminate the need to back up the entire RAID as would be the case if you had to add a new drive to a RAID set that used a single large partition on each drive. Theoretically this can all be done even while the machine's running, once the new drive has been installed - though file server performance is likely to take a bit of a hit.

See this website for a better explanation of the above.

I am curious. Does a "newbie" actually buy a book on a linux distribution? I would assume that plenty of online guides are much easier, cheaper and are (arguably) a better choice.

For example:
http://gagme.com/greg/linux/fc6-tips.php
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.h tml
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installati on_notes.html

If I'm pessimistic about the "free" part about Linux, would I spend $30 on a book? Additionally, so much changes in a given 6 month period for something like Fedora. Is is really beneficial to recommend a book to someone when any given chapter could be totally outdated for the next release?

It seems that a lot of people find it difficult to get multimedia apps working on their Linux systems. Last week I installed FC5 on my PIII Thinkpad. Out-of-the-box multimedia support was pretty bad. I didsome searching on Google and found several sites about upgrading. They involved adding new repositories and then installing with YUM. What I did was add the repository and then use the graphical interface to select the packages and click install. it was pretty painless. Now I can even view WMV and ASF files.

Disclaimer: Even though I've never run a Linux desktop until last week, I administrate several linux servers, so I guess I'm not an "ordinary" PC user.

FC5 Tips & Tricks
Personal FC5 Installation Guide

Really? I guess it "sorta" does but let me clue you in a helpfule way:

Get mplayer, the codec collection and the plugin for mozilla/firefox. You will find that you can play it back just as nicely, if not better, than in Windows. Worked like a champ for me.

If it helps:

I run FC4, nVidia-something-er-other proprietary drivers (RPM packages from ATRPMS.net) mplayer, mplayer plug-in (RPM packages from livna) and the codec collection (tarball from mplayer.hu). Most all of this done without any technical skills -- I just followed the directions from http://home.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc4-tips.php --here.

Don't know how easy it is with other distros, but FC4 is a pretty easy place for me to start anyway.