2 quick questions - CS4 and additional OSs

First thing I'll say is that the enter key,i.e., paragraphs is your friend, it makes reading your post much more pleasant

Secondly there is no "best" way to run windows. Its subjective and depends on your needs. If you require access to the hardware and/or performance, then yes its the best. If you don't want to boot out of OSX or don't need the performance of running windows natively, then VMware is a better solution. That's the route I have taken. Gives me the best of both worlds

Running windows under vmware is no more secure or safer then bootcamp, you still can catch a virus, or have a malware program destroy your windows partition. It just won't spread to OSX. The only exception is any malware that attempts to directly access the hard drive, in vmware it still will be constrained to vmware but in bootcamp, is possible that it could impact the osx partition

As I noted, I use vmware and find the performance to be excellent, though I don't play any games or need direct access to the hardware. I think OSX is superior and so I like to keep that running and do most of my work in there so for my situation vmware is the better approach

Mike