First of all, be aware that running Windoze in Parallels will "choke" on a lot of games. In otherwords, if playing Windoze games is your primary (or only) reason for Windoze, then Bootcamp is where you want to go. I don't believe that Parallels (or Fusion) yet really supports playing more modern games (I believe that Parallels supports Direct X 8, but not 9 or 10). Having said that, at this time, I would likely suggest Windoze XP...for gaming or even in general. If you do want to run in Parallels, then I woud DEFINITELY suggest XP over Vista. It should be noted that there are current games that will play in Windoze XP, but that in theory are "better" or design for Vista as they are designed for Direct X 10 (which I don't believe if supported in XP). This of course assumes that you have a DX10 compatible graphics card (not sure if that true of any of the graphics cards in any of the Macs except for maybe the nVidia 8800GT that is available for the Mac Pro). In general, games still play faster (i.e. more responsive and faster frame rates) in XP, I believe.

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Member of the "Crazy Mac Users who run Anti-virus on their Macs" club - come join us and you too can be snickered at!

Unless you need "enterprise" level networking stuff and file permissions or such, Windoze XP Home will be just fine. If games is all you are after, then Windoze XP Home is all you need. You will want SP2, which is all you can get if you buy Windoze XP new. There is no difference between SP2, SPb, and SP2c that I am aware of other than Micro$oft had to "go to" SP2c because they ran out of license codes/keys for SP2b (i.e. think of it like a third printing of a book). Technically, you want the full retail version, but an OEM will work...just realize the OEM get ZERO support from Micro$oft. You DO NOT want an upgrade...unless you have an older version of Windoze that you can "upgrade" from...but I don't know how easily that process might or might not be if you do go to BootCamp (BootCamp will ONLY work with Windoze XP SP2 or newer, but Parallels in theory can run pure DOS if you want, but can certainly run older versions of Windoze).

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Member of the "Crazy Mac Users who run Anti-virus on their Macs" club - come join us and you too can be snickered at!

Very true. Which is why I have a Bootcamp parition in addition to running Parallels. Bootcamp is largely just for the fun stuff (aka games). Parallels is for the structural engineering applicaitons that I use that are Windoze only. If gaming is the only goal, then Parallels is a waste of time (unless your idea of a game is playing Solitare in Windoze)...and game with any reasonable graphics requirements will choke Parallels.

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Member of the "Crazy Mac Users who run Anti-virus on their Macs" club - come join us and you too can be snickered at!