No such thing as a free lunch, or ...
I stopped club membership over a year ago as I found the club offering me very little value and the distro progressing somewhat but walys with one or two areas that didnt quite work.
I was pleasantly surprised that I could download Mandriva 2007 this year in October just after releause using BT and got a functional live CD. Installing to HD and then adding main, contrib (&PLF) gave me a fully functional version (with some gripes; dkms/nvidia failed in yet another way after a kernel upgrade, but one gets used to these things). I downloaded the 'non-free', i.e. version including nvidia/ati (and some other) kernel modules. The 'free' refers to free as in speech not free as in beer...
So, where I had expected to look at alternatives (maybe PCLOS given its heritage) I am still on MDV.