If you open Windows Explorer in WinXP, you have a choice of how to display contents of folders. If you click "View" on the top bar, and then select "Thumbnails,"
for any graphic file that WinXP recognizes, it will create a thumbnail and display the thumbnail, with filename at the bottom, directly in Win Explorer.

Note that there are a few "common(?)" filetypes that WinXP doesn't recognize, (.psd is one) and it will often "bomb" on files over about 300KB - 500KB(?) or so in size, but for most routine use, the view thumbs in Windows Explorer works about as well as most of the "auxiliary" programs you may have had with earlier Windows versions.

If you select "View Thumbnails" in a folder that doesn't have graphics files in it, you won't see any pictures, of course. You'll probably get a "tile" view with program icons for the non-graphic files. If you have .jpg, .gif, .wmf, .ico, or small .tif and .bmp, you should see a small version of the picture itself - for those files.

Some Office programs (Word, Excel, Access, etc.) offer the option to "save preview" when you save the document, and if you do this you may see a picture of the first page in thumbnail view. I don't use this much because adding the thumbnail does increase filesize by a bit, and the "picture" you see is usually too small to be of much use.

John