Next comes the networking side of things:
IE - fine, can browse the Internet and is pretty fast, can also browse my local Intranet Explorer - cannot see any other machines on the network, when it should be able to see two other Windows 2000 boxes
From the other Windows 2000 boxes the machine shows up in Network Neighbourhood, but when I try to see what is shared I get an error saying the machine is not accessible.
Conclusion - Windows XP does not integrate easily into an existing Windows network!
I installed Windows XP on the same day as you and everything worked first time and it connected to my (XP) network, saw all the shares and connected to Internet Connection Sharing with one simple wizard. I think XP is very good at networking with other XP machines but it's notoriously bad for administration on big networks with NT/2000/2003 running on them.
I found a hard disk installation of Knoppix almost as easy to connect to a Windows network, and considering it ISN'T windows, I think that's pretty darned impressive! There are even graphic interfaces available to make samba even easier I believe!
I'm not sure why Windows has to reboot after every little change, although XP seems a little better in this respect.
As for being off topic, don't think people are too fussy. There have now been about 30 posts on what the correct way to reply to a mailing list is...
Ben "tola" Francis