[AccessD] SQL Server advice

You would be totally wasting your time with SQL 2000. Why begin your
learning 2 versions behind? And within 6 months, you'd be 3 versions behind
(Denali will be released by then).

Since you have a six-month window, my advice would be to install SQL 2008
Express on a Windows 7 box with about 4 gigs of RAM. For diving into SQL
Server, this would be a sufficient learning machine. As JC wrote, you won't
get all the benefits of a serious machine, but it's not for you anyway, it's
for the client to decide whether to pick up that cost. Everything you learn
on Express is directly applicable to upscale versions. Granted, there are a
few things you won't be able to learn (clustered dbs, for example), but if
you make it through the major stuff (Management Studio, T-SQL, views, stored
procedures, User Defined Functions, Reporting Services and Analysis
Services), what remains to learn won't take long.

Arthur