I was going to say more about that, but my wife walked in and started talking to me, and I know what's good for me...
I have been told that the problem with SP2 is that it is designed to block adware, spyware and pop-ups. If certain spyware or adware is present when you first install SP2 then it causes wierd problems. Allegedly if you download the right stuff and clean all this out it will install and work fine.
My problem was that I tried to upgrade from Windows XP Home Edition to XP Pro. (Required for school.) It got into some kind of wierd mode, where it offered to let me boot into the "old" configuration or the new. The new died every time. So I dumped an image of the disk to another PC and wiped it, installed XP Pro fresh and SP2 while I was at it. I copied the disk image back into a folder so I can go find old documents and files, since I have a huge hard disk. Two more days of reinstalling programs and I was done. No problems since. It's been six weeks and works great. I was even able to find and restore all my archived Email from you guys, so I didn't lose a thing.
