a) yes
b) i'm not sure what you're asking here
c) it should, just make sure you include the usb device as first in boot order. when it doesn't detect anything there, it will move on to the windows bootloader

Just stick with ubuntu. You'll get fairly submerged into linux and eventually get bored. Wine will start to fail, manually loading drivers sucks, but it's pretty interesting to learn. I can boot ubuntu up any time on this machine, I just haven't done so in ages. I guess I only explored it for purposes of exploiting the shell.