You can make XP look and act just like Win98 without much work. It has a feature to just switch the look and feel. I do that any time I have to work with XP. Once that is done, it is all the upgrades without all the (un)intuitive usability changes. And all they're talking about is that the start menu is very different, and a few things are hard to find. Don't worry and go ahead and jump in.