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Well, I am going to give a report of my experiences with XP SP2. This will be for general computer use (office/work) and gaming... Does anyone else have anything to add?

Work machine. This is a eMachines Athlon64 w/Radeon 9600 laptop. It has built in wireless 56G and a Broadcom GBE port and an AC97 sound system. It was running XP Home (all one could get at the time). I added SP2 about 3 weeks ago and have had zero issues with it. I DID have to do office update as well as I was about 2 service packs behind on my Office XP install - including Visio 2000. I also run Quickbooks basic on that machine for my side business, regularly use Outlook and Outlook Express, office apps, putty, VNC, a USB to serial adapter, M$ Activesync for my PDA phone, USB connected HP printer, USB mouse and other pretty standard stuff. All of this works great post SP2. I have also since upgraded this machine to XP Pro - all still works well.

Home machine 1. This is my 'old' gaming PC. It is an Athlon XP with an Asus AN8X Deluxe mainboard (NForce2 chipset), SBLive, Adaptec scsi controller and drive, Saitek GM2, Stickworks SWF22, and ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. I upgraded to SP2 and my games quit working. GUI's usually work fine, but once into the 3D world it locks up within 60 seconds. Sometimes it is a very long stutter - up to 30+ seconds, but it eventually locks up with either a black screen or the display-at-the-time. I have not messed with trying to fix this machine...

Home Machine 2. This is the new machine. It is an Opteron 248, Asus SK8V (K8T800 chipset), SB Audigy2, IDE drive, Saitek GM2, Stickworks SWF22, and ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (I took stuff from the other PC). It is a challenge keeping this cool in an older case, but I am well below alarm limits. I installed SP2 straight away onto this machine, and then used the settings migration wizard to move a lot of my stuff... After reinstalling Falcon and Joint OPS I had the same issues with locking up. I have tried different versions of video and sound drivers and removing the sound subsystem altogether. All to no avail. I then removed SP2 and installed ALL updates up to that point (including .NET and Journal Viewer) excepting DirectX 9.0c. Everything works fine now, and the machine is quite stable.

I suspect it may be that DirectX 9.0c is included in SP2 and I will test JUST DirectX9.0c next.

Anyone else?

I had problems with Ravenshield/Athena Sword locking up with SP2. Uninstalled SP2 and it went away.

I had to install DirectX 9.0c for Star Wars Battlefront and have had no problems. Yet.

I also have had DX9.0c for awhile now with no problems.
Have stayed away from SP2 for now.

I've been using SP2 for several weeks now - zero issues. My setup is similar to Steel's - Opteron 148, Audigy 2, same mobo. I haven't tried many older games, so I won't say you are all wrong. For me, JO has been fine, SWBF has been fine, NWN is fine. More info later perhaps.

I've stayed away from SP2 as well.

System Specs:

Windows XP PRO, Athlon XP2400, Abit NF7-S V.20 Mobo, Radeon 9800 Pro128MB, Seagate 80 Gig HD, Some cheap ass £5 sound card, 1 GIG PC2700 RAM, Onboard ethernet network to wifes PC(Win 98SE)

Have been running SP2 with DX9.0C for a few weeks now and had no issues with any old (Janes F/A-18/Falcon 4) or new (Lomac/X2) games/sims on any front, be it start up and playing the games or connecting via multiplayer and have found the new Windows firewall to be just as good and easy to setup as my Norton personal firewall, so i removed Norton as it was a resource hogger and still had no issues with SP2.

Very happy with it.

From the first day this computer went online, I've had SP2 and I've had no probs with any my games. Dragon Soyo mobo, 640 ram, radeon 9500 pro, SB LIVE! Value card. Runs smooth and clean.