XP is also designed to have you running multiple accounts at once. AKA be able to bring someone elses desktop up and still leave your applications running in your login. And for that reason is my them would bump up the requirements IMO. Comparitively my Quake3 gets the exact same fps in win98 as it does in winxp. I have dual boot and did the tests back to back, might have been a .1 fps differance. XP is definately what WinME was suppost to be, the stability of NT and the user friendlyness, idiot interface, of win9x. So far RC1 has done damn good, not a single crash, lookup, BSD. If something is known to cause problems XP will ask you if you want to load it at startup. Much better then Win2k that would give you the Blue Screen of Fuc|<doum(basically a reinstall unless you made recovery disks) when you installed something that screwed up its booting. Im still downloading RC2, but I have heard its basically the same with a bit more preformance pulled out. When I get it up and running and do some testing I'll let ya known. Right now im reading through the slackware 8.0 linux disk my friend gave me today.
ID10T errors are the cause of most consumer's computer problems.