I actually wish I could still use 98SE...I hated having to upgrade to 2000, at least with 98 I could fix problems easily with a dos prompt. No more...and its not more stable without dos, its less.
And yes, I noticed that XP takes much longer to load and uses much higher resources than 2000, loading a bunch of crap services you dont need. Then, as always, you have the fun task of trying to manage the services to get rid of what you dont need.
At any rate im hoping I can hold on to 2000 for at least another year...programs are starting to require XP as a min, even though those programs still seem to run on XP, which to me seems odd....