Would this be avoidable with good coding, or is it pretty much determined that using .net restricts the user to IE?

I don't know a lot about .net, first off, but this particular response was in relation to the ``How closely can I make a web version look to my desktop version'' part. I've seen a number of web applications that use DirectX or other nonsense to make a web page look exactly like a standalone app by using the full widget set of Windows. That sort of thing is going to be IE-specific, and not .net specific at all. .net should be able to transmit fully w3.org compliant stuff to the browser.

So, yes, it would be avoidable with good coding, but the more cross-platform you make the app, the less like your desktop app it's going to look.

You could write it as a Java app, conceivably, and have a full widget set of some nature and still be fairly cross-platform.

Essentially all the users will do is log on, select a bunch of data from a database, and print out some forms.

If all you're really doing is gathering data, then parallelism shouldn't be hard at all. The Intel platform is probably your cheapest bet there. It'd be really cheap if you had someone who could administer a Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD machine, as you wouldn't have to worry about paying Microsoft for their OS and trying to figure out their apparently intentionally obfuscated licensing scheme. Of course, you then have to figure out how to send different people to different servers.

My point about that in general is that if you are testing out a 4CPU Intel machine and it doesn't do the job, then it's hard to get any bigger. If you were testing a 4CPU Sun machine and it didn't do the job, it's easy to buy a bigger one that wouldn't require any difference in your app.