Who bleeding  cares about the so called 'security fixes'? Once you get a stable install, you disable every auto update feature you can access (and block the ones you can't with a firewall) and sail along merrily. All you need is a router with NAT (yes, they can be tunneled through, but that takes an active black hat to do it; no script kiddie's confection can at this time), and a good firewall/AV package. I only updated XP-64 to work with software that required an SP to function. My current Win 7 hasn't been updated once, and is nice and stable and so far secure.

Aside from that, all you need to do is make sure nothing installs any 'helpful' toolbars to 'make your  online experience easier!' (these pieces of crap are the new attack vectors for the kiddies; if they are not there, their efforts are futile. No vector, no infection).

Computers are stupid; they only do what they are told and nothing more. I'm just hoping that now that the current game consoles actually have something akin to useable hardware specs and running the x86 codebase, we might hopefully see some killer games appear for the desktop. Security is in the hands of the user, not the company.....

Oh. My rack is running 5 iterations of xp-64, along with one vista box and a win 8 box (which was done to try out the thing. Blech.).