My take is that XP is, in fact, more stable than 98 or ME. But just about anything is... It's a very complex program and installing it yourself takes some knowledge. By default, XP installs all the bells and whistles; you may not want all of this and you will need to know how to do a custom installation to get things the way you want them. As was mentioned before, you will also need to be comfortable with finding and installing drivers and you may find that some devices don't yet have drivers that will support them in XP. You will probably find problems with some games, for instance OpenGL games may have problems with XP's ActiveX version (I believe this is 8.1). For me the bottom line is XP isn't worth it. Learning Linux is just as easy as learning everything you need to know about XP, and Linux, in the long run, will give you a more stable system.