Best HTPC setup

Yeah, I guess it would help if I looked at the specs... :). I have a Triad Bronze InCeiling system.... works great for an Inceiling/multi-purpose room. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with my sound system portion, and that will be the last piece to be upgraded... I'm not an audiophile, in that I can tell the difference between really high end systems, I just don't think it's worth spending that kind of money past a certain price point.

I found an interesting discussion on this topic here:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/01/24/516487.aspx

At the moment, I'm leaning towards just building and keeping it in my living room -- going with a fairly basic configuration, and then upgrading and maybe moving it to the office later...

I need to play around with linux a bit more... i'm pretty sure my final setup will be with Vista (i'm betting there will just be more functionality that's easier to use in the future)... but I might play around with a linux setup first. I don't know anything about linux file systems, and whether I can just partition my disk, rip my dvds to a different partition than the OS, and later change the OS to Vista. I'm guessing Vista won't be able to read whatever linux uses for a file system, and I'll have to re-rip my dvds...