Ok, me again. :-)

Thank you ALL very much for such great advice on this issue. I now feel much
better equipped to ask better questions and making more informed decisions.

While all the comments were coming in, I decided to go ahead and download
the NetBSD Firewall project from http://www.dubbele.com to see how easy it
would be. After wasting about 3 hours because of bad hardware and Road
Runner giving me the wrong IP addresses :-| I finally saw how truly easy it
was to set up such a thing. Long live BSD...Microsoft routing be damned! :-D

New questions: (sorry)

Someone mentioned OpenBSD is more secure. Should I use that for the firewall
instead?

I see lots of posts in groups (and I think here once) saying that FreeBSD is
faster. Should that be a workstation?

Is NetBSD a good web server? Email server? The "Net" part of the name has me
wondering.

What's the difference between the firewall and a proxy server? They seem to
serve the same purpose (or, maybe they just coincidentally provide some of
the same services).

Thanks again.
Fernando