Haven't played around with BSD in YEARs but was impressed enough with FreeBSD 7 on my mate's laptop to figure it might be a good change from Linux, if only for a while.

I have a couple questions for any current BSD users though.

Any BSD OS you'd recommend over FreeBSD?
Any virtual box/emulation/compatibility layers/etc you'd recommend for a BSD OS?

Bear in mind I'm not a fan of Apple computers so Darwin's pretty much already out and it's Windows I'll need the second question for, likely for apps compatible with Windows XP. On Linux I tend to use VirtualBox and WINE to get Windows apps going and am pretty sure there's a version of VirtualBox for BSD, though don't know if there's anything better.

Cheers for the help people.