I suspect the problems I ran into have to do with SP3. I figured, as long as I was starting from scratch, I might as well do the latest of everything. Combine the homebrew SP2 disk with the official SP3 download, and it's not deeply surprising that you could run into a case where Microsoft didn't get test coverage.

The need to download additional drivers and crud from Dell was surprising. By default, Windows was using some kind of unaccelerated graphics driver (scrolling was *slow*), it didn't know how to hibernate the laptop, and it didn't know about the wireless. And the volume buttons didn't work. At least Dell had everything in one place where it was easy to get. (And, I had the forethought to download all of that stuff *before* I wiped the machine...)

Still, based on my Ubuntu experience, I could say that the only thing standing between Linux and being a standard desktop operating system is a supported port of Microsoft Office. Not that Microsoft would ever dare do such a thing, but that would give a lot of people all the reason they'd ever need to leave Windows behind, once and for good.