emacs/slime is a bag of dicks, I have a .lisp file open in it and all the compile and execute commands are greyed out, wtf? LispIDE is the easiest Lisp editor to get started with in windows, I wish it worked in Linux too.
its pretty easy to get LispWorks running in Linux, although it has some weird limitations (heap size, cuts out after 5 hours of usez). I dont think Corman Lisp has a trial version.