Louie made me laugh. XP is quite annoying. If you were thinking of buying XP, think instead of buying 2000. It's nice and stable. I haven't had any major problems with XP either, but it keeps wanting to update crap all the time. Every time I think I've disabled it, something else comes up.
If you're networking, might want to stick with 98. 2000 seems a little slower to me, but maybe I haven't learned all the tricks yet.
As far as reformatting 3 times a year, a little tip for you. When you have all your programs freshly installed on a clean OS use drive image and make an image of your hard drive on either another hard drive or another partition. Re-building your OS with all your programs will take 30 min compared to numerous hours depending on how much software you use.
With all that said, you could leave the dark side and join the linux force. Be free of Microsoft! It's too late for me, I'll never be able to leave.