I don’t understand all the problems these folks experience with XP. I’ve never experienced a single problem with MS XP nor have I had to deal with malware or viruses. BTW....I’ve been utilizing XP since the official version came out.
Personally, I don’t think it is as much the holes that are open rather than the possible attack vectors. When an email exploiting bad code in paint that also effects sql (or some such nonsense like that) can bring down an organization, something is just plain wrong about that.