utter BS. All software is compliant, it is just a matter of how much work you want to put into it.
Not really, you need Wine to run Windows software and even though it works just fine for most software, there are known issues (and, nitpicking, but I think it's rather inaccurate to call software "compliant" when it neds a reverse engineered API from another OS to run). YMMV.
Also drivers are never an issue. ATI has some issues with compatibility and stability, bit otherwise there are no driver issues at all with Linux. It comes out of the box with 90% of the drivers, and the other 9.9% are available right out of the repositories with no searching on your part. If you haven't got the knowledge to use Linux, do not go trying to advise on it.
"Never an issue" is a bit of an exaggeration, though. Wireless support is still sub-par (the situation has gotten a lot better during the recent years on laptops with Atheros open sourcing some of their code and Intel maintaing open soure drivers for a lot of their hardware, but the support for desktop wireless parts is still rather poor). There are quite a few hardware manufacturers who refuse to release documentation to allow OS development, and many of them don't bother with Linux support at all or do really poor job at it (Broadcom, AzureWave and TP-Link come to my mind off the top of my head).
Even though Linux usually supports all (ar at least most) hardware out of box, driver support is still a fair distance behind Windows and OS X, and the possibility of one having unsupported/poorly supported hardware is still pretty high.
Anyway, AFAIK all Mint CDs work as live media so you can just chug the disc in and boot to the OS just to try it out. It will be slower running it from a CD, but it should let you test out the basics and how well your hardware works out of the box. As for wiping the HD, you don't need to do that - the installer will allow you to set up and format the partitions (or automatically do both for you), but before doing this you will of course need to back up all your files on whatever driver you're installing to.
I also see there are 2 Linux OS Mint and another what should I know about each?
I didn't check but I'm assuming you're referring to the Gnome and KDE editions. Those are the desktop envirenments thaht come with each - Gnome is the "official" DE for Mint but I find KDE better (it's all preference, though - as far as software compatibility goes, it doesn't matter which one you pick).
While I'm in this software section is there a add blocker for the annoying adds that run in the right hand side of my e-mail?
Not sure what you mean by this... do you mean ads that come up when using webmail? If so, AdBlock Plus is available for Firefox on Linux as well, it should probably get rid of most of them.
