Ah. Unfortunately, no one mentioned that XP can be an utter mother to deal with in the setup phase (on the assumption you do not have a pristine install). the most common 'gothca's': (1)Do you have a Promise card, or other RAID card that your boot drive is on? If so, you need to have the drivers handy on floppy, and ignore both 2k and XP's splash assuring you they have the driver. The odds of there being a version conflict are pretty much 100%, unless you bought the hardware at the same time as the OS. Or move the boot drive to the main IDE controller on the motherboard until you get the install done, the put it back where you want it. (2)Do you have any kind of AV software installed? That can easily lock the boot partition and treat XP like 'viral software' and protect you from it. :P (3)Is your hard drive formatted to FAT 16, by any chance? You way want to consider keeping the 98-SE; despite the plaints about age, if you use Shane Brooks 98lite installer controller, and yank things like IE, Outlook, and other security features out of it, and put the Win95 desktop on to get rid of the active desktop, you =will= get a stable OS that is backwards compatible with older software. XP's 'compatibility mode' is vastly overrated, and deliberately so. It's Microsoft's golden chance to kill off all that DOS-Win3-Win9 stuff that people insist on using instead of forking over $$$$$ for the Latest and Greatest...at least according to the ad shills. The dual boot is worth the hassle; and if you set your drives up as FAT 32 and install onto that, then if XP buggers, you can access it and dig around in it from 98-SE. Real nice option for deleting things you don't want or need... Now, if this is a -dedicated- box, akin to a workstation, then definitely go with a single OS. But if it's a multi-purpose, the more compatibility the better in my book (writing this from a dual boot between 2kpro and XPpro; the 98lite is on a seperate box now).