re: dual head video
I've been "dual-monitoring" since about 1988 and actually feel sort of lost and uncomfortable with a single screen.
Giant monitors are nifty but expensive, often have color issues, and are a single (pricey) point of failure, I find two monitors around 19-20" the ideal setup for most anything we need to do. Only a few projects require us to use our larger monitor setups rather than a dual setup. For day-to-day work, even 17-inch is workable for many uses, and its pretty cheap to buy 17" flat-panels these days.
For image or audio work its great to be able to have controls on one screen and working image/target file on the other. Another cool thing is running side-by-side revisions for comparison, running different application or OS versions side-by-side for testing, side-by-side comparison of page rendering in different browsers---You will find endless ways to use it!
Dual-display just isnt that expensive anymore. Unless you want to game, performance isn't even that much of an issue. The fairly affordable, low-end NVIDIA GeForce 6200 does the job for many of our staff.
I agree that using two sgood quality, seperate cards is usually the most effective route. You do pay a premium for dual head cards.
If you use windows you may want to consider a little software add-on called UltraMon, which expands some configuration options.
http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/overview/
Mac and most Linux distros already have such tweaks built-in.
I'm curious to hear how it goes, I hope you'll update us!