Windows XP

[Belial6]

Good:  Picture handling.  The MP3/WMA handling is kind of neat, but not really that useful, as your media player of choice will be where you deal with those generally.

Bad:  Networking.  XP has known networking problems.  It frequently tries to reauthenticate with other computers, and often is incapable, even with proper usernames and passwords.  It's not unusable mind you, but definitly anoying.

[Belial6]

That's just SMB (Windows file/print services), that prob is with every version of Windows.

Disable SMB.  It's bad for you.

No, it's not.  The SMB file and print sharing works fine on every other version of windows.  I won't debate whether it is the best file sharing protocal or not, but it was stable on every version prior to XP.

As for 98se vs. XP... XP is dramatically more stable, so if you are really annoyed by having to reboot our computer every day, XP would be better.  Of course 2000 is almost as stable as XP AND the networking works.