Yeah, it's definately things like this that piss me off about XP. But to tell you the truth (and i -hate- giving MS accolades) their Windows product has really matured and improved over the years in a lot of ways. I'm still stuck supporting Win95 on some machines at my work, i can't handle it.

Start->Settings->Printers (on fresh boot) and the Printers window hangs. *sigh* *throws pc out window*

I just get the feeling that things have come into shape (especially with 2k, it actually made running a win32 desktop tolerable) and matured over the years. So I run XP at home, and at work.

The one thing that really gets me about XP is all the hidden crap that MS put there for it's own gain.. Reporting of search keywords, phone-home crap, default MS Virtual Desktop login, and jesus christ has anyone looked at the list of open tcp/udp ports on a default install (of Professional)?

So i spent the better part of 3 months fine-tuning my XP install. XP-AntiSpy does a good job of turning all of hidden MS stuff off. It never hangs, never sputters (p3 1ghz w/512mb) and with proper fw'ing i like to think i've got it secured.

Plus i really dig the themes