1. No bloated UI cruft.
2. No KNOWN "phone home to Redmond" code.
3. It works.
4. It works.
5. It works.

Win2k is FAR from out to pasture yet. It sounds like for what you need (dev work) it will do everything you need it to. No games (and Win2k actually handles most games reasonably well... I've actually run old DOS games in a shell, without sound. The Windows XP compatability stuff was rolled into Win2k without any real fanfare around SP2.) just dev - and that fits Win2k.

Enjoy!