I took the leap today, against all advice, and installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 on my laptop. It was a little slow to install, but completely painless, and seems to have caused absolutely no problems (so far). I’ll subject it to some heavy testing before putting it on the other machines, though.

No major improvements, except for a very slight (very slight) advantage in blocking more pop-ups (which I know courtesy of a great site for testing that–thanks, Gregg!) than the Google Toolbar alone was getting (I do love the Google Toolbar! :-)). Of course I know that the best way to block them is to just stick to Firefox, but there are some sites (mostly with java and javascript, or other plugins), where the Fox doesn’t quite work right. Contrariwise, however, there are some purposes (like disabling that nasty WYSIWYG toolbar in Blackboard, as well as avoiding popups and security flaws) for which Firefox is absolutely the best solution.