I've never actually used XP so I can't say much, but I have seen a couple tests were 2000 was a tiny bit faster, less overhead perhaps. But I'd guess they would be equally solid. In the benchmarks above, mine is the 1.4 AMD, so I can say on identical machines 2000 is about 10% faster than 98, anyway. Right now my 200 partition is sick, so I'm running Max (and Poser) in 98, it does crash more, Max is much, much slower, too, a lot more than 10%, more like 50%. However, all the old non-NT utilities (Like John Stalling's CR2 Editor) crash a heck of a lot less in 98 then 2000, there is no free ride! XP and 2000 are more-or less NT6 and NT5 (some of the 2000 files even call it that), they don't have DOS underneith like 95/98/ME.