Really, not in my experience; my box has the lid off more than on from tinkering, and yet I rarely have a crash under 98SE. I'm only considering this because I got an incredible deal on some hardware, I can get XP with a $60.00 rebate, and I do have a video corruption I can't seem to fix on my old system. Should be an interesting learning experience, tho.
I don't like it because everytime you do anything, especially with networking, you have to re-boot, plus all the other stuff people have been saying.