Fortunately, I nexer got XP. They didn't make any significant changes to the 2000 kernel and I can live without most of the other toys they added. From what I've garnered, many of the problems with XP SP2 are related to security such as the firewall now being enabled by default. Apps that depended on working in what was a less secure environment (including some of their own) choke on the new configuration. I guess I'm just incredibly lucky. Since I installed 2K, Windows is very stable and troublefree for me and that's on a development system where I'm always doing installing God knows what dll and doing abusing the api. Of course, I run a firewall, AV, AdAware and Spybot and try to keep them up to date. IMO those commonsense practices are at least 90% of the answer to most problems. But, as I said, I may just be lucky :-)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken