She actually had to use Knoppix for a few days a couple of years ago when there was an HD problem on hers and I wasn't available to work on it. It didn't skip a beat.
With all the XP boxes I support at work, the endless cycles of restarts is so frustrating sometimes. A policy where I am at is that no one can know anybody else's password. That is great if the user doesn't disappear for varying amounts of time at random intervals.
Linux is wonderful in that it rarely, if ever, needs a restart during normal use. Something else I wish MS had (that worked) as an equivalent would be the "X-Kill" to stop crashed programs.
My boss is a MCP (I used to be, long story) and I freaked that person out with my live CD's running on presumed dead Windows boxes. I had to fill out a form to have them around officially and gladly did. I welcome anyone around to load them up and check them out.
With all of the programming minds where I am at, building some kind of custom Linux based image to run things day to day, would solve a lot of problems in terms of reliabiilty.
I have learned to really hate Active Directory in the past few months. Mysterious glitches, random rejections of passwords, profile corruption, and the sheer overhead of AD is 95% of my typical support effort.
