Jim - Rifleman has a good point. I'm not an XP user so didn't want to
get too precise. My personal preference has always been the classic
look, which probably dates back to DOS days. My W2k's all look almost
identical to how my NTx.x's looked, but are hugely advanced in device
support and general ease of use.
If you're building, then you may get into the legacy-device-support
cracks I understand exist, where there may or may not be W2k support and
may or may not be XP support, with situations where W2k has it and XP
doesn't or (for newer devices) XP has it and W2k doesn't. Some people
here have reported that in the former case some W2k drivers will work
with XP. If memory serves, I have yet to see reported cases where XP
drivers work with W2k, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I also haven't seen any traffic about legacy (or brand new) software
that works on one but not the other. I can report never having had any
trouble with even extremely old software running on W2k except certain
kinds of DOS-type stuff that depended (in unorthodox ways) on directly
manipulating hardware, and threw up when encountering the virtual
hardware interfaces or were shot in the forehead by those interfaces.
(As far as my memory is concerned, you get what you pay for
The bottom line I guess is that there isn't any general "best" choice.
It sounds, though, as if you can live fairly easily with that. Have fun
with the new machine! And stick around, there's a world of knowledge
free for the reading in these newsgroups.