Confused Options

[mogwaione]

ok first what is the difference between a drum synthesizer and a drum machine? are they the same thing or completely seperate? could you use a program like ni battery as a drum machine or what type of program would i use to simulate a hardware drum machine? are there any free hosts i can use out there to load plug-ins into? im a little confused by soft synths too. so many of the programs say sampler or sequencer. in my understanding a sampler samples bits of audio (like how the beasties sampled so many sounds on pauls boutique) am i thinking correctly? and a sequencer keeps all the different sounds or instruments in sequence? basically im looking for software to emulate a hardware synthesizer and drum machine and vocoder. what would i use as the actual synth and the vocoder and drum machine would just be a plug-in right? im a little lost. im fascinated by alot of the stuff mogwai does and i know that they use both hardware and software synths, etc.. i want a synth that can play piano and string sounds but also do crazy effects like delay and noisy stuff like wolf eyes does but i know little about the technical terms and apects of doing this so any help would be appreciated. i need to understand this stuff in simple laymens terms because i have no musical training at all and am by no means a computer pro either. anyone have any ideas? i do understand that a midi controller can be used to control the physical aspects of the software (the knob twiddling and stuff) and then you have things like pro tools and cubase which as far as i can understand are like mini studios emulated by software. then you have soft synths which would be things like pro 53? or arturia moog modular right? then you have plug-ins which i guess are just more soundsa and effects you can add on to the soft synth? can anyone break it down for me so i can understand?