Personally I like OpenSuse, but don't want to argue distros here.
One think I would suggest is to try out the Live CD's first and settle yourself on one and then distribute that one across the board. It's a lot easier to diagnose things if you have the same distro and version.
I do have to disagree with the gamer comments above. I think that the poster has "clients" like mine that just want to surf, email and write the occasional word and excel documents. Open office is fine for this. most people i do this fine are fine with the games that come with linux like solitaire and frozen bubble.
One thing to really look at is the desktop. even though people argue about distros the real difference is the desktop. Personally I prefer KDE to gnome but that's my preference.
In my case the main reason to do this is updating an older pc that windows is getting slower and slower on. The reason I love linux is the fact that it doesn't suffer from windows registry rot. The linux machines i've installed are all still running. The windows machines all seem to get slower after the first shareware and games get installed. (Not to mention installing anti-virus software which is really necessary but an overhead on some already ancient machines.
Just my 2 cents.
