but I don't use it much. I turned off as much of the glitz as possible (there's some setting for Maximize Performance or some such in one of the Settings).

If things are flaky you probably need to do the usual stuff:

1) Check the registry with something like Norton Windoctor
2) Check for spybots with Spybot Search and Destroy or similar
3) Make sure your hard drive isn't too full or too fragmented (yeah, it's grasping at straws).

There's always backup, reformat, reinstall but I've been fortunate that I haven't had to do that since Win95B.

XP doesn't seem crashier than Win2k to me, but I prefer 2K anyway.

HTH a bit.

Cheers,
Scott.