I had tremendous problems with Maya and other heavy-duty programs using XP, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on. Whenever there was a tremendous load on the system Win XP shut down. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with either Win XP or the programs, but rather flaky RAM. RAM can apparently function even if it is broken, and since there was just "slight flakiness" in my 1 GB of RAM most of the time the system wouldn't use the bad portion. However, when I started Maya or something it would, and sent XP down.