If the machine is old, go for LXDE, you can have the Gnome stuff there also, but it will improve the performance a lot.
What exactly do you wanna do?
This machine is running an Intel Quad Core Q9300 @ 2.5GHz with 8Gb of ram and a Radeon 4350 video card on an Intel DG45ID Motherboard
and currently running Kwheezy. Like I said in the OP I would like this build to be the main brain for my media center and torrent trackers. eventually I would like to set up FTP so that I could grab media from outside the sever. But for now Id like to keep it simple.
As far as documentation for linux goes its hard to beat the Arch wiki -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/To be honest though, if you are new to linux, Debian is maybe not the best way to go.
I chose it because it seems to be very stable and have tuns of support. Could you give me a suggestion if I where to go another direction?
Thanks for the help guys!
Yap, good enough.
Managing torrents, try deluge or vuze, for having the files available there a quite a few options, the easiest one SSH, you can try winscp for coping on windows, don't know how to mount on windows, but if on linux you can mount easily with sshfs.
You also have samba, http, ftp...