Larry,
>>You wrote: "I have not heard of one person who had a major problem with Windows XP that was installed by a major computer manufacturer."
Larry, you just heard one in my previous post!
By March of 2002, when you got your computer, MS had already changed the OEM version of XP that was supplied to the computer manufacturers. My original install by Dell was in October 2001 and was the pits.
Also, you and I are perhaps talking about different classes of software. The run of the mill Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and other software of that type worked fine.
Pagemaker, Autocad, and others of that class, and most of the special software that I used, did not. It was quite a while before both Microsoft and the high powered 3rd party software designers got their acts together.
Now every thing is fine.
Regards,
Walt