Craig;
Your advice is great, except that 90% of the people here have no idea what you just said! Also, 90% of the infections I see these days have nothing to do with a virus. The malware now in the wild produces overlays on web page elements. You click on those elements, you are hosed. I haven't found an Antispyware/antimalware product yet that will block them because the computer saw you click on the element and assumes you know what you are doing. The Antivirus2009 variants are notorius for this.
Dual booting isn't a technical issue anymore. Stick the disk in, accept the default configuration, reboot and select either Windows or Linux at the boot screen. The new distros aren't quite as efficient as the "purer" linux variants out there, but they sure are a lot easier for folks to install and use.