Two replies here. Firstly, the web client does work quite well. It's a VERY convenient way of getting to your emails when off-site / no laptop etc. It seems to work best in Chrome on my Fedora and Centos boxes, but I hate how Chrome tried to take over your PC. Mine for example even changes the volume of my music (using squeezelite connected to a Squeezebox, so I can monitor the background music played in our showrooms) Secondly, I've used VirtualBox extensively for testing purposes (I use LAPP for the servers but all of the client PC's run Win7 / IE) Even on a relatively small sized desktop PC, the performance hit of having Win7 inside a VM as well as everything else I do isn't a biggy. To be fair though, all I use my desktop for other than running the VM is to SSH to other boxes. I know you said that your bosses want stuff running on physical kit, but it could be argued that it's a small compromise. Ignoring everything on this thread, my first course of action would be to challenge the decision, although you may have already done that. Gary