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I have three personal computers I use heavily... two windows xp (a desktop and a laptop) and a desktop running Linux. Of course I use a host of computers elsewhere, but since these are the only ones I am currently in full control over, they are all I'm going to comment on.

A little aside, I have my two monitors (one for linux, one for windows) side by side as if I were running a dual-head system. I use a little program called Synergy that lets me set share a keyboard and mouse between the two, and also shares the clipboard between the two machines. I used to use x2vnc/win2vnc but this program is a little slicker. I really do use and develop on both systems...

I typically have both desktops on all the time. I reboot both the windows xp and Linux machine about once every two weeks on average, not because they crash, but because I'm leaving for the weekend or a power outage, etc.

Windows XP is much much more stable than previous versions. Of course this implies that you know how to handle spyware, etc.

I do have programs crash on both machines. I normally to keep firefox open with 2-3 windows each with about 20 tabs. Typically after a couple hours it will leak memory, and eventually I will have to restart it, on both windows and Linux. As far as explorer crashing, this only happens anymore when I do one of two things: open a folder with a large zip file (one containing ~15k files), or open a folder with avi files that are damaged.

Incidental I have experienced similar problems with konqoror and nautilus on the linux side.

With a little work you can disable the thumbnail generation and treating archives as compressed folders on both platforms.

There are legitimate complaints about XP, but it is a stable OS.

-paridel