I wanted to post a few quick thoughts on my experiences with the collective upgrade of all the machines I work with on a daily basis to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). During September I was on the road a lot and doing various keynote presentations and high-profile demos with my production laptop. Not a time for instability or odd behaviors on my "production" laptop, so I started by upgrading my home PC's.
My newest box at home is a Shuttle PC and the upgrade to SP2 was an absolute non-event. The service pack went down without even so much as a reboot, and was just totally smooth all around. My kids play educational games every once in a while on a Dell Optiplex that I bought three years ago. After upgrading that slightly older PC to SP2, the machine would reboot a few seconds after the XP login dialog would appear. I tracked down the problem using a Safe Mode boot to being a USRobotics wireless card's driver that needed updating. Now that machine is working pretty well, but upon shutdown, rather than turning itself off, it puts up a blue screen saying that some kind of Memory Parity Error has occurred. I'm still waiting to get the time to further sleuth that one out. The kids can play in the meantime, and I've taught them how to hold in the power button for a few seconds so the machine ultimates turns itself off.
I upgraded my production laptop a couple weeks ago and didn't have any problems until yesterday, which was the first time since the upgrade that I popped my Linksys wireless card in the PCMCIA slot. Doing so promptly stopped the machine in its tracks. After installing the latest driver for my wireless card, that problem went away.
So, all in all, I'm pretty impressed the the Windows XP SP2 upgrade. The problems that did occur were minor, and remedied with simple updates to my networking hardware drivers. Given the amount of testing that must go into a release like this, I think Microsoft has done a nice job on it.
1:05:03 PM 
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