The first thing I did when I got the thing last year was to turn it on, watch it boot, go 'urg' at the horrible fiddlyness of the GUI and spend the next hour tracking down and disabling every bit of eyecandy I could find. In the end it looked more or less identical to 2000, but in many respects didn't work as well. There are all sorts of things built into XP that get right up my nose, whereas I get along with 2000 about as well as a rational person can with a microsoft OS. I still spend at least half an hour a day actively hating it, but it's usable most of the time.

For instance, XP out of the box insists on opening ALL images with the build in browser, even if you install a third-party app and associate the filetypes with it. This is just broken. If I associate a application with a filetype, I damn well expect that application to run when the file is clicked on, not some other braindead program that has some hidden link to it.

Wireless connectivity is another pain in the arse under XP. It has a tendency to associate with access points on a semi-random basis, and often gets itself into a state where it refuses to connect to the local one in favour of attempting to connect to one it saw three months ago five hundred miles away. Or, if another AP comes on nearby with a stronger signal, the damn thing goes AHA! and connects to it, dumping the one it was currently using. Drives me nuts. 2000, while full of niggles in it's own right, seems to be mostly missing the gratuitious irritation factor of XP.

pca