<I>2) I'm not sure if there is normally an option for adjusting this, but I changed mine using TweakUI. This is of course one of the PowerToys. If you haven't used this tool, I highly reccommend it. </I>

Right click on an empty piece of the taskbar, go to properties, and uncheck "Group similar taskbar items".

Biggest hint of XP that I can give is go into every properties that you can. That means right click on My Computer, and many other places. There are so many ways to customize XP to fit your usage patterns.

And I ICQ'ed a friend a good list of reasons why I run XP, even though I don't like it that much. Here they are:

"1. I like the shell enhancements. Not the Luna crap, but the other minor things.
2. Eventually it's going to be more of a pain to load 2k on my systems compaired to XP due to age and drivers needed. (Though the time taken to tweak things back to 2000 style does offset this a bit)
3. Pro aparently dosen't have the open sockets problem
4. I can get rid of MSN messenger and Media player 8 (I'm using Trillian and Media Player 6.4/WinAmp)
5. I have an official no activation version, complements of work.

I don't like XP, but Windows is something I have to use, so I might as well use the best of all of them."