Anyone experienced with Media PCs?

[Freakin]

I just picked up a Zalman HD135 to build some old Athlon hardware into a media PC.

I'm still trying to decide between XP MCE and something a little more controllable like MythTV.

I'm not planning on having a tuner card in the system (can't compete with Tivo, IMO) so it will be mostly just for media files, etc.

My biggest concern is configuration of MythTV. I've never set it up before, and I'm not terribly familiar with setting up and troubleshooting hardware in linux.

I'd like to get the zalman built in IR receiver and VFD display to work with linux/mythTV, but I'm not sure if that's going to be doable.

The main reason I'm looking towards MythTV over XP MCE is for a decent catalog of movies & shows that have 'album' artwork & information pulled from IMDB, something I believe that MythTV can handle.

If any of you have worked with this stuff before, I'd appreciate some guidance. I'm currently installing Ubuntu Desktop (GG) on it and I'm going to install MythTV on it afterwards.

I'm planning on following this guide for the setup.

If possible, I want to be able to completely remove any "Watch TV" options from MythTV so they don't get in the way.

HALP!