Personally, I feel that XP is hella better than 2k. I know a few people who have had problems with XP, but I've had very few.

The initial interface is really ugly. If they are going to 'borrow' from Apple, at least borrow the pretty stuff. The boot-up time is amazing. It was like 5 mins with Win2k, but like 36secs with XP. I really like that. The interface is snappier. I don't have to wait for the menus or anything to pop up any more. OfficeXP works very nicely with it. Explorer.exe seems to have a memory leak or something. After about 4 or 5 days of uptime, it is chugging like 17megs of memory (not a significant amount). That is just enough so video chugs. Like every 3 secs, there is a 1 sec skip. That can be rectified by killing explorer.exe until I am done with the video, then restart explorer.exe. Annoying, yes, reason enough to not switch, not quite.

The passport thing doesn't bother me. I use a dummy hotmail.com account. Anybody can spam it, and I won't care, because nobody real uses it. It is just a spam account I set up. Am I bothered with activation? No. There are ways around it, if you want to. ZoneAlarm pretty much keeps anything from phoning home that I don't want to phone home. The built-in firewall is pretty crappy. It might be fine for normal people, but I'm far from normal (you can tell, I bought an empeg ). I haven't used the built-in burner. The programs I bought and used in Win2k work fine in XP for burning.

The overall lack of security of Windows boxes does bother me, but thats because I'm from a Unix/Linux world. Have I ever had anybody break into my Windows boxes? No, you just have to know what you are doing. Have I had a virus? I did once, back in '93. I am a lot more concerned with my Linux boxes and security. That is only because they are a lot more powerful if you break into one (that may change with the new raw sockets). I run Zone Alarm Pro (damn good program, and well worth the money), and a virus scanner, which pretty much keeps me safe.

XP is a huge step for Microsoft, and they did a fairly decent job. Is it as good as the other OSes I use (Slackware and Irix), not quite, but getting better.
What I love is people who make claims and rant without any personal experience with a product, just what some writer has to say. As far as I can tell, most journalists (of the big media companies) have no clue about what they write. They are looking for a way to sell articles, page hits, subscriptions. A way of doing this is to bash things that are popular to bash.

I don't work for Microsoft, and pretty much hate most of their stuff (yeah, WinME was miserable, etc, etc). However, I do like XP and the improvement it is over their past OSes. Just don't bash something you haven't used personally.