John,
I'm curious, do you work in the IT field (I assume you do)? If so, are you a developer? Actually, I looked at your and you are a UNIX system administrator....
I would upgrade in about one second flat. For me WinXP simply doesn't crash (programs crash but the OS doesn't). Anyway, just make sure you do a fresh install and things should go smooth. I do a lot of HTML and PHP development on my XP box but anything else is usually (VB, COM, C++, JAVA, etc)...