Need advice on what road to go down based on useage

defiantly a quad core with all that running, but seeing how none of the apps you listed are very intensive I wouldn't bother with an i7

i7 also has hyperthreading so it's "kinda" like having 8 cores... Multiple programs can use multiple cores even if they aren't designed to make use of multiple cores themselves. I mean IE can run on one core, Firefox on another, telnet on another, etc, instead of cramming all 40 instances into 2 cores you can spread them out over 4 (or 8).

Definitely get a lot of RAM if you do that much multitasking. Get Vista and wipe the hard drive as soon as you get it and put XP on it. You shouldn't run a computer with all Dell's crap on it anyway.

Do some research and maybe your boss will let you build your own based on cost savings. I convinced mine to let me build our 8 new engineering computers and saved them almost $10,000 while still getting better stuff than Dell. Although with just one computer you may not get the same results.

GL!

Edit: that $10,000 savings was back 3-4 months ago so I'm sure Dell has more choices for cheaper. Still though, you will save money doing it yourself.

Do NOT wipe Vista and put XP on the system. That was a fairly ignorant comment stemming from over a year ago. I would recommend getting Vista 64 which will make your transition to Windows 7 64-bit easier later this year. The easiest thing to do is to buy a second graphics card if you are running all 4 monitors independantly. You could buy a better aftermarket workstation card but those are big bucks and your usage indicated doesn't really warrant it but I obviously don't know the whole picture. ATI and nVidia both make good cards - I prefer nVidia but you are going to get ATI with Dell.

^ it is for some apps like video encoding but not for others.

and win7 is vista with some extra's so I see little point in getting it.