A corruption of the Windows XP registry on my dual-boot laptop has pushed me overt the edge -- it's time to single-boot with Ubuntu 8.04.1. And that means it's time to jump the hurdles I always knew would be a part of a complete transition. The hurdle I'd like help on tonight is a replacement for Outlook.

We (meaning my wife, too) "live" in Outlook and have for years. It has offered us fairly seamless sharing (via e-mail, NOT Exchange Server) of tasks, appointments, notes, and contacts -- all of which we use extensively. Outlook's syncing with my Pocket PC lets me take those same items with me.

I've been playing with Evolution and Thunderbird/Lightning all week, trying to make up my mind which way to jump before converting my Outlook data. Among my thoughts and questions are:

1) How do I make repeating tasks in Evolution? I'm kept "on task" (quite literally) by tasks that repeat daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Am I missing some setting in Evolution?

2) Of the two programs, I like Evolution's interface better, but I can live with Thunderbird's. Is there a newer version of T-bird in beta, and, if so, is the UI improved?

3) I can't seem to find a way to "pop up" event reminders in Lightning, whereas Evolution does this without any intervention on my part. Can this be done in T-bird?

4) Which program is more likely (even if that means "not very likely") to be made to sync with an HP iPaq PocketPC? Our budget doesn't allow me to replace the PDA with something else at the moment, so a Palm PDA isn't an option.

5) From what I have read, it would seem that Thunderbird, even if it "loses" to Evolution in my final choice, is the one program that can massage the data from my Outlook.pst file to make it useable in Linux programs. Or is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for any input and responses.