Public and private blog

Hi

Ive looked around the forum but cannot find a solution to my problem.

I am building a website that would have 5-7 information pages, contact form and a newletter sign up form.
I am also building a ‘members’ section for my users that will require a login to view (i.e. ‘private’). This will have quite alot of plugins, calendar, rss, subscribe to posts, newsletter etc.

The visitors to the ‘information’ section won’t be able to subscribe to anything, only see the info pages, use the contact form and subscribe to the newsletter.

I was thinking of having two WP installs to differentiate the users and if needed two databases to keep them completely separate.

Ideally, I wanted a WP install at the root, i.e. mydomain.com that is for the ‘information’ section and was thinking of using mydomain.com/members/ as a WP install for the ‘private’ section.

Has anyone used this approach and did they run into any conflicts?
Is there a better way to achieve a solution?

Thanks in advance for any assistance/advice offered.