I'm a newbie so I can't post in the appropriate location... but
I was considering the issues of linux vs windows, and how easy it is to OC and monitor the video cards within windows...
Would there be any advantage to running linux virtualized within windows; using windows to control OCing and monitoring and linux for the actual GPU mining? or perhaps even vice-versa with windows virtualized?
No, the performance hit is significant. Just choose an OS and run it. You can overclock on Linux too.