I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as I've been elected network administrator by my employer

you too? About 4 years ago all of our computer gurus found other employment within about 6 months of each other. Since there was nobody else interested I volunteered. I had some help for a while, but then they laid him off after 9/11. So its been just lonely old me keeping the 20+ boxes running. The nice thing, is that since I'm the only one that understands how all the pieces go together it makes for some very nice job security. The hard part is trying to do my computer duties and my architectural work or deciding which one is more important at the moment. Ussually its the one with billable hours, until something bad happens and nobody can bill hours till I fix it. Ouch.

As far as XP goes, I love it. Microsoft did a lot of things right with XP.