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Fortunately I've got backups for most all of the data (I've learend to keep those thanks to the frequent need to reinstall Windows), but damnit, I'm just tired of picking up the friggin' pieces once or twice a year

Six desktops, three laptops in our household, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've reinstalled the OS over the last decade. Usually, it is because of a malfunctioning utility that I've had to do it, and I've not had to reinstall the OS on any of the computers here since I stopped using utility programs.

First and foremost, look at external USB hard drives. Buy one with a one-touch backup function and use it. That way, if you have to reinstall the OS, you're most of the way there. A hundred dollars spent sounds like it could save you twenty hours of work, not a bad cost/effort ratio.

Next, look to the user. XP is honestly a generally stable platform, even though I'll bash it mercilessly. I'll whine and moan about it, but usually, it is because of something I did.

Look to your risk factors - are you using Outlook or Outlook Express to read mail without using a filtering program to shut out viruses, trojans, script issues? Perhaps you might find it useful to do what I did - forward your e-mail to an external web based server such as Google's Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Their filters could take the brunt of the attack workload and save your hardware.

Are you downloading programs from the Internet to try out? Or are you opening attachments sent by friends and family? If you are, it might be best to pick up a cheap machine to use as a 'play' thing, keeping this risky behavior separate from your more serious activities. I download a tremendous amount of data from the Internet and what few problems I've had with viruses and the like has typically come from my e-mail box.

Not to be offensive, but one of the things I had to come to understand is that the knowledge I have is likely more dangerous to my machine than anything else. I've crashed my OS more than a few times by applying what I thought was the right solution to a problem that didn't actually exist. Luckily XP recovered from these issues (thank you system restore points) but it did finally teach me some lessons. Number one; Critical OS patches are generally good to install, noncritical patches, especially driver updates, is generally like rolling the dice. The second lesson I learned is: back it up. And the final lesson I learned - use Firefox (or similar) for web browsing.

My in home tech support requirements dropped dramatically with these lessons and now I only have to maintain my wife and daughter's machines, and usually because of their using IE or opening a cute attachment.