I got one calling "me" a wanker, after a 5 second pause...

I did. It's primitive, but works astonishingly well. The answers are even pre-generated via text-to-speech engine. Most people don't get it. The best so far I put on youtube. If you understand german, prepare for a good laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eOcjrIGf_Y

I prefer this one: http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc/ No gui. Scriptable, with a c-style language. Very usefull.

The Asus RT-N16 should be up to this task, as it has a rather unusually powerfull cpu on board.
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=WAa6AQFncrceRBEo&templete=2

This is fixed in the current version. The problem was aero, which is now automatically disabled.

With UltraVNC Single-Click, you can give them a smallish program to run and click. No need for opening ports or anything, as the connection is initiated from their side. For this to work, only you need to open and forward a port on your side (and have ultravnc listen server running).
http://forum.ultravnc.info/viewtopic.php?t=15865&sid=b6c0c94c99f3095d318eace245e09b49

The single-click program could be easier to use, though...

I've got the following box:

• Intel D945GSEJT http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/D945GSEJT/D945GSEJT-overview.htm
• 500 GB laptop harddisk
• 2 GB RAM
• 12V PSU

Eats about 10 watts on idle.

This is even easier:

egrep -q "(svm|vmx)" /proc/cpuinfo && echo yes || echo no

You can do that using the taskbar shuffle freeware: http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm/

Actually, Windows XP is NT5.1 and Vista is NT6

Get yourself an AMD 64 X2 4850BE (2.5 Ghz, 45W), a mainboard with AMD 780G chipset, an efficient power supply and two western digital green power drives. That'll eat about 40 watts on idle.

10.4 at least also has a few problems with smb. Locking for example, and a bug with aliases, as far as i know. 10.5 seems to have fixed those two problems i've experienced.