fedora core 2 (and reading windows drives/partitions)

i'm currently running mandrake 10.0 community, with gnome 2.4 on my athlon xp 1800+ system. i want to check out fedora core 2, because mandrake 10 has a few issues that i was going to reinstall to fix anyway, so i want to try something new while i'm at it.

i used to run fedora 1, for about a month until i couldn't stand it f**king up all the time... also, i couldn't read my windows partition with fedora, but with mandrake, ever since version 8, i can...

the biggest reasons for wanting to try fedora are:
>gentoo takes too long - and last time i tried it i just couldn't get it to go
>a lot of decent programs come in rpms for redhat/fedora, and they're a lot easier to install
>i really want to check out gnome 2.6 and some of the new apps that only fedora has with it currently
>i don't really have time to tinker with gentoo, slackware, or debian, although i wish i ran one of those instead...

basically, i want to know if there are any reasons why i should keep away from fedora 2, and also, if i do end up giving her a go, is there a way to read my windows partition in fedora? basically, i have tons of mp3's on my windows drive, and i don't want to have to copy them over...

thanks a ton,
~zach