As you learn the system you will find some things that it does that you can turn off, if you have privacy concerns. Xp has online fault reporting and on line remote access for MS techies. I turned mine off and never used it.
Get zone alarm if you want to know exactly what it is doing and make zone control the internet. I do and I am quite sure nothing goes on that I do not authorize. I think people who hate Gates are trying to get people to believe that XP is somehow unsafe.
I was one of the first to get it and saw the de-bug process. The OS, (while complicated) is good, and it works. I had some complaints early on, but they have all been addressed via patches. It has worked fine for months now.
I hae XPHome and have been happy for the most part. But suddenly I have 2 probs, that I haven't investigated thoroughly yet.
One, the most recent set of updates trashes my machine when I try to install it. I get all sorts of warnings of the general form "AD9Ef-XXXXXXXXX-Yadda could not be written -- the data has been lost" and then scandisk comes on when it reboots and for some reason, no keystrokes will stop scandisk. This has happened 4 times, all with this most recent set of updates. My DVD player has been behaving erratically ever since the first time it happened.
The other is a popup dialog that comes up at odd times advertising male "member" enlargement. It has popped up twice while I was browsing FR. Spy++ indicates that the dialog is a child of the desktop, no process to kill. I have heard of a trojan that does that, and my daughter or one of her friends could unwittingly have downloaded one, but I did not find the file indicated to be the culprit, so I may have a new one.
For all I know, the two problems are related. The timing is certainly a coincidence.
Other than those two recent(but very troubling) problems, I have been happy with XP, once configured to be a little less dummy-fied.
I have another machine(older), that has win98SE on it. I think I am going to set it up with linux eventually, just for kicks.