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Edited on Fri Apr-18-08 10:57 PM by RoyGBiv
By way of introduction, I'll say that my opinion of all distros these days is somewhat skewed by the fact that my system now is a bastardization of two different ones and includes elements that are packaged originally in neither. I certainly don't run what could be called a home-brew distro, but I also don't run anything that you can get off the distribution disc alone.
And therein lies the rub with some of your requirements ... and the requirements of pretty much anyone who uses a computer for anything these days. Due to patents and copyrights, distros tend not to work "out of the box" for everything you want to do, particularly involving multimedia and wireless networking. Consider mp3 compatibility. The problem with this is not the format or the ability to use it. The problem is a legal one involving patents. It is beyond simple to make any Linux installation work with mp3s, but distributions tend not to have it incorporated from the get-go because they could get sued. Overall there are libraries available or in production as alternatives to the standard "just works" variants, but you usually have to get those on your own.
Anyway, I disliked Fedora the times I tried it, and I haven't used more recent versions, so I'll avoid comment.
SuSE and Ubuntu are of course two of the major players. Ubuntu has a "just works" factor that appeals to many, and the ability to update it with the customizations that allow you to do things like read DVDs and play MP3s is well documented and simple. This distro is, by my perception, geared more toward the home user with its inclusions in the main package, and as a Windows user, you may find it more friendly than others.
The vanilla version of SuSE is what I began using on my main system a few years ago. It's gone through several iterations, some of which have royally sucked (versions 10.0-10.2 were stinkers with broken crap all over the place), but the present 10.3 is stable. It includes some distro-specific tools, such as SAX2 and YAST, that appeal to Windows users because they simplify the process of administration of the hardware and the system as a whole. It's package management system is the same as Fedora's (rpm), which I don't like as well as Ubuntu's, but it usually works, and the openSuSE team have developed a repository structure that is more efficient than what previously existed. Updating for multimedia, etc. is, again, well-documented.
I don't think you can go wrong with either version, but I'll offer a warning about SuSE. The upcoming 11.0 version has some issues. It is currently in an alpha stage, so that is to be expected, but the direction it is going has me wary. The new desktop manager KDE 4.0, in particular, has some serious bugs *and* new elements that I dislike even when they do work. YMMV. So, you could install 10.3, but fairly soon (by late summer probably) you'll either have to decide to stick with that version or be prepared to upgrade to something that's going to look and act in some ways totally different than what you've worked so hard to get used to.
(Of course, if you go the route of learning about the command line, this won't be as much of an issue, but I don't detect that as your goal here.)
In the end, the truly nice thing about distro shopping is it is basically free. Try 'em both. All you are investing is time.
Hope that ramble helps some.
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