Wow, took at least four replies to get Damn Small Linux mentioned! :)
Short and sweet. Look up featherlinux. http://featherlinux.berlios.de or DSL - Damn Small Linux.
its a knoppix remaster of 64 megs, has wireless, fluxbox as the desktop, and no accelerated X but for wordprocessing , e-mail (sypleed) and browsing (dillo and I have installed firefox too) its more than fast enough. Vncviwer and lots of apps are standard, and you can live cd with save your personal stuff on pedrive, hard drive (fat32) or floppy, or install to hard drive and use it as your distro.
Thanks Gavin, but I don't want Sylpheed, I want Evolution or possibly Thunderbird. I don't want dillo, I want a Mozilla. And I want OpenOffice.org. I want equivalent functionality to what I would expect on a common Windows machine. I know if you want to run tiny distributions on tiny hardware you can. What I want is to run modern applications on older hardware. If modern applications aren't architected to support this, then that is the problem. Craig