So, because YOU have had a good experience with XP, my bad experience is worthless???
I runa a small business and have a total of 6 PC's of various fabrications. Two on XP Pro, the rest on XP - all at current levels of SP, patches, etc.....
Three of the PC's (all different) have worked for over a year with ZERO problem.
My "Office PC" occasionally craps out (lost connections to the printer requireing new install), but nothing "serious" (just annoying)
My "home PC" is the one I described earlier - and the corrupt registry is one of it's favorite problems - I know the revoery process "by heart" and regularly save a copy of a current registry manually to save time and booting.
My other "home PC" refuses to install windows 2000, windows XP Home / Pro - won't copy the files from the CD (an old version of Linux works just fine, so I use that for my "learn Linux" box)
Laptop is "flaky" but laptops are anyway "flaky" (no crashes, just annoyances . . .)
So, "XP is rock solid" is, IMHO a bunch of BS. Is it better than it's predecessors - sure - is it what it should be for the price - no way. I hope that the "new" developement methods will fix this - but, after dealing with MS headaches since at least 1985, I have little faith.
Then why don't you move over to open source everything tomorrow? emacs is easy to use.
Lighten up Francis. Did I say that?
It is rock solid, I know state departments that are running XP and office and they're having very few problems.
If you're having so many problems, maybe you should start checking your hardware or more likely, there's a piece of software that isn't Xp compatible but you do know you can tell software to run in compatability mode, right? You've got your choices of '95, 98, NT 4.0 and 2000.