Must admit I went for fedora about 8 years ago now and haven't had many issues with it at all.
In fact my aspire one hasn't had any tampering with for years. It just gets a yum update and it always goes through with no problems. In fact it must of had 5 full OS upgrades using that method.
I just followed one of the "prefect fedora desktop" aka
The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 18 XFCE | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
type things.
Must have done 20 odd machines now without any issues.
Network I will admit I have a old but pretty functional knowledge of all the various *nix config files, so I think I had one intel wifi card 5 years ago that was a pain in the bum. But after 30seconds I fired in a new one of a different make swapped from another laptop and it worked a treat. Put in another repo and got the correct driver and then swapped it back.
To my knowledge none of the machines I have set up have needed any tampering with after setup. They just do what they are intended for and updates go through and they continue to work.
As you say not much point if there is a usable Win 7 installation you can use. It was just a suggestion for the XP users in your flock.