Nah, I was just kidding, but you do seem to have some OS issues. I've had xp on three machines for a quite a long time now, and no issues. The OS was getting a bit flaky on me on my main machine, so I just restored a ghost image from a year prior to get it back like new. If you do a lot of installs/uninstalls your Registry can grow to an unruly size, but other than that, there are no time-dependent issues that I'm aware of.