it was a dos os trying to create a user interface that needed more facility then the os was capable of addressing
all you had to do was turn off all the glitze and you had a pretty stable machine that ran pretty fast
I am a little worried about vista for the same reasons that milleniim turned into a dog
even though vista is rewritten with cleaner code, it's just a layer on top of the nt kernel, which isn't a bad idea in itself, but the reason xp is stable is that it is not pushing the envelope of it's own capability, there is "overhead"...it can do more then it's asked to do, there's plenty of room over what it does versus what's it's capable
when you deminish the overhead, bing, less room to compensate for advresity such as bad programing and dirty code, etc
we'll see how good it is when it's done and we all start pushing the limits