While setting out to construct new solutions at various companies, I'm faced with the usual technology issues that plague software professionals: A shortage of hardware resources, and a tendency to favor Microsoft technologies, despite the availability of Open Source alternatives that may be better suited for the task in question.  This kind of corporate culture makes life difficult for Power Programmers who are capable of so much more if there was a Linux Machine readily available.

Resisting the temptation to bring in one of my spare Xbox-Fedora machines to the office (with a puny 64MB of RAM available), I decided to seek alternatives that would allow me to run a full Linux Distribution under my existing Windows machine.  The obvious candidates like VMware, VirtualPC, and QEmu cropped up, and I agree they would be the easiest way to solve this problem.  Unfortunately, VMware, VirtualPC, and QEmu are large frameworks that provide full hardware virtualization, which isn't quite what I'm looking for.  Running a Virtual Machine Guest is a rather bloated way to accomplish what I was looking for.

I also have Cygwin readily available on this machine, but alas, Cygwin is useless when it comes to isolating the "Linux" content away from the Windows content.  I really wanted the merits of a Virtual Machine -- having its own resource, and living on its own IP Address; and I really wanted the light-weight functionality provided by the Cygwin solution.

There just had to be a better light-weight solution out there.  As it turns out, there is a better way.

Through my research, I stumbled onto CoLinux, which is a patched kernel that runs as a Windows Executable, and has networking support. Not a bad idea at all, it sounds just like what I need.