I dislike networking and system administration/configuration.

Nevertheless, sometimes the network/sysadmin option is less hassle than the 
alternative.  

Currently I have one land-line.  It provides dial-up internet access and 
normally is connected to my primary workstation, running SuSE.  
Unfortunately, for some sites you just *need* to use Internet Explorer.  
Currently, I unhook the line and plug it into the laptop that runs Windows 
2000 Pro.

I'd like to just leave the stupid phone like connected to the SuSE machine.  
Unfortunately, I don't know HOW TO set it up as a proxy server (or, for that 
matter, how to get the Windows machine to use the SuSE machine once it is 
configured to proxy-serve my little LAN.)

Any advice on how to learn to setup a Linux proxy server would be much 
appreciated (eg, books, web-pages, even mention of applications and config 
files I'll need to tinker with...).