Red Hat 7.2 was released in 2001. A lot has happened in open source in the last 8 years, particularly on the desktop. Open source evolves at a very rapid pace. First thing I would recommend would be download a recent linux distro; your hardware is more than capable of running any modern linux distro.
For your hardware and given your desire to have a winxp feel to things, I would recommend your try either mandriva or pclinuxos:
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free
http://www.pclinuxos.com/
They both include the proprietary drivers for your nvidia graphics card. Both feature the KDE desktop which many coming from windows seem to prefer. PCLinuxOS is probably the easier to use of the two as it comes with most of the browser plugins already installed and the software repositories with all your multimedia codecs already configured. Mandriva is more up to date, cutting edge type of distro but it is very user friendly and easy to setup.
The other major type of linux desktop is gnome which is featured in ubuntu and one of ubuntu's most popular derivatives, linux mint.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
The gnome desktop has a more of a Mac like feel to it if your into that sort of thing. Both are very popular but Mint is probably the best choice for some one new to linux. Neither come with your proprietary linux nvidia driver installed by default but both will boot to a graphical desktop using the open source driver and both have a menu entry for installing third party drivers which is pretty painless.
The best part is that all of these distros come in the form of a bootable livecd so you can see how they run on your hardware, what they look like, etc, before you install. You really can't go wrong with any of these distros so try them all and see which one you like the best.