blah789

I think when you pick boot normally, the reason it goes back to the menu is because it rebooted (most likely a stop error - aka BSOD - Windows 2000 and higher are set to reboot automatically when encountering those). When you pick safe mode, what was the last driver it attempted to load? That is most likely the culprit (the one that hangs the system). You can attempt to boot into your XP CD (if you have one - NOT a recovery CD), and go to repair, recovery console. Then fiddle with commands like listsvc, enable, and disable. Listsvc basically lists the services and drivers that get loaded at boot time. disable will disable one (your run that to disable the service or driver that caused the hang), and enable will enable it. If you're lost in recovery console, type help and it will display the commands available to you.
One caveat: you should probably report to us which service/driver hangs, because it could be a critical one that's needed for the system to run at all. For example atapi.sys (in which case disabling it is a no-no!)
If all else fails, you can do a repair install. Basically pick repair when booting from the XP CD, then choose automatic repair. It will reinstall XP originally, but without overwriting your data files. However, programs, updates, patches, and everything settings-related will have to be reinstalled manually.

As for Linux not being user-friendly... it's gotten a lot better over time. There will always be a learning curve, but how steep it is may also depend on the distribution you pick. I haven't used Ubuntu, but a lot of people on here say it's a smooth transition for Windows users.