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@ChrisNW
BTW, going back to the question of whether to wipe the HD and do a full disk install of Linux...
My personal choice for a 160Gb HD on a laptop is to have:
partition 1 - XP (NTFS) 25Gb
p2 - Fat32 80Gb for shared storage.
p3 - Linux Swap 2Gb
p4 - ext2 100Kb (boot partition backup)
p5, p6... - split the rest between various Linuxes.
Trouble with reusing a /home partition is that some of your settings from previous installs get carried over into new distros, messing them up slightly. I'd advise just backing up your /home and reinstalling the bits you need (such as firefox bookmarks etc)
I have done something like this in the past:
100% XP partition resized to 50% (GParted), add 50% ext3/ReiserFS, copy over files to new partition, resize new partition to 100%. It worked, but I wouldn't have liked doing it without a backup of evrything beforehand.
USB external drives are so cheap now, you could pick one up for about 30GN and have peace of mind.