Charlie
If you can beg or borrow a broadband connection somewhere, SuSE do a very good 'live' CD - just download, burn to a CD-R and boot from the CD. It lets you try out SuSE Linux without needing to involve your hard disk. If you don't like it, you just bin the CD and that's that. No partitioning, dual booting or anything else.
If you do like it, and would like to buy a copy of SuSE, then I would go for the personal edition. As a beginner, you will need few, if any, of the extras offered by the Pro version, and if you get hooked then you can very easily upgrade. Install is excellent, and SuSE offer something called YOU (YaST Online Update, where YaST is Yet Another Setup Tool
) which works very well for updates. Security is excellent, although you do have the freedom to make it less so. I'm still on SuSE v9 at home and work, but i'm very happy indeed with it.
One thing that I frequently say is that if you have only used Windows, Linux is a bit different. While both offer the usual sort of point'n'click interface, underneath are decades of differing views about what constitutes an operating system. However, Linux has made great strides in usability over the last few years (the first time I installed SuSE, probably six years ago, it suddenly lapsed into German and popped up a dialogue box saying "Achtung! ..... Ja, Nein?". I clicked "Ja" and it formatted my hard disk. D'oh). Stick with it, ask questions - here or elsewhere, there are some very helpful Linux newbie forums - and I hope you enjoy! One day you'll find yourself wondering why people spend hundreds of pounds on another operating system...