This is a very newbish question, but coming from someone with absolutely no Mac experience whatsoever, is it possible to have two installs of OS X Leopard on my Mac like two installs of Windows on my PC?

To explain my reasoning for this, I bought a 24" iMac a couple weeks ago. I was at first going to use it strictly for work purposes - I'm a video editor, and use Final Cut Pro extensively on it, so I want to keep it off the internet so that it won't get bogged down. However, the more I see my $2,200 machine sitting there only being used half of what it can be, the more I want to put it on the internet and try using OS X as my main OS, as I've only used Windows. Therefore, by having a second install of OS X, I could boot into one for editing/work purposes, and one for everything else.

Could anyone tell me if this makes any sense and how I would go about doing this? Thanks.

I don't see why not. Just google for an OSX bootloader or use one of the many available hackintosh versions with a vanilla kernel and install that along with a bootloader like Chameleon (which most of them use iirc).

He's got a real Mac, there's no reason to use a hackintosh anything - just use Boot Camp to repartition your hard disc into the appropriately sized partitions, reformat the NTFS partition Boot Camp makes into HFS+ Journaled, pop in your OS X Install Disc and install on the new partition. You can bring up the native EFI bootloader at any time by holding down the Option key - I did this, too.

Thanks for all the help. I didn't think this could be that hard

Eventually I might throw Windows 7 on it, but I am eager to play with OS X since I've never used it as my main OS.

How is going on the Internet going to "bog down" your "work" partition...? Seems more like a waste of space to me.

Installing Mac OS X on generic PC is call "osx86", you can find more information here: http://www.osx86project.org/