I'm on the same boat as Genisis X. Haven't use Windows for many a year as well though.
I setup a very not technical/savy friend PC's years ago and he uses Gmail. The best thing I did (IMHO) was to completely hide IE, use Firefox and set virus and Windows updates to automatically update. He still uses WinXP to this day, and the same Gmail account.
Only thing I've found is that AVG won't perform application updates without user interaction, which is a bit of a pain.