Okay, whizzing straight off topic, but I'm intrigued by your comment. Is it purely the visual appearance of XP that puts you off or some other design aspect?
If it's the former, all the Windows 'classic' themes are still available just as they were in Win98 so you can make your desktop look just the same.
It is indeed the interface. As with many people, the first time I saw Windows XP I thought 'wow, this is so impressive compared to the old UI'. I upgraded to XP. 2 months down the line, and what I thought was impressive I started to find increasingly fisher price (mainly the colour scheme with the bright blue title bars and the bright red close buttons). Then I realised that you can't actually change it; wheras the old UI was rendered by the operating system, thus affording the user a lot of control over how it looked, the new one is loaded from image files. The main issue I have with this is that you don't have control over the colour scheme.
For the better part of 10 years, I have been using a quite sedate, but gentle on the idea, 'adapted slate' colour scheme. It's basically the 'slate' scheme from Windows 95, with the scroll bars increased back to the size of the 'Windows Standard' scheme, and the title bars chaged to a black-red gradiant. But with Windows XP, I can't have this any more. Thanks to the non-rendered nature of the interface, and the limited choice provided out of the box, I have a choice of garish blue, tacky silver, and some indescribable gold/green/yellow scheme. None of which I like. Beyond that, I can make Windows XP look like Mac OS, or any other one of the myriads of themes that were designed for it (all of which look crap imo). But all I want to do is take the basic XP interface, and adjust the settings (and cruicially the colours) of it to fit in with what I like. But I can't. Therein lies the single biggest flaw in the design of the XP interface.
Role in the 'ah but if you really don't like the new look you can always choose the old one if you want' brigade. Except it's *not* the old look, it's a bastardised version of it which Microsoft have gone out of their way to turn into an undesirable option The old 256 colour system icons don't come back, the new designed for XP high colour scheme is still there, looking downright bizarre amongst the rest of the interface with it's more limited pallette.
They also introduce a number of 'lets make it shit so they don't use it' measures; i.e. with the 'Windows XP Style' theme, the new Start Menu displays the user name in quite a nice font with a picture next to it. It colour codes different sections of it. With 'Windows Classic Style' selected, the start menu changes to the user name written in Arial Bold Italic, coloured the same as the title bars, without the picture, and with the same uniform colour throughout the whole menu.
Even I live with that, and now get back the ability to customise the interface, I'm no longer able to save a colour scheme, and if I alter any interface settings (even just change between XP style and classic style) it will kick me back to a standard colour scheme from the list.
Microsoft have even spread this 'make non-XP look nasty' policy to other applications; with Office 2003 the task pane with the XP interface activated displays a Microsoft Office Online logo for you to click on. With the classic interface in use (or if you use it on Windows 2000 as I am doing), that is replaced with a text link. There is no reason why this had to happen.
Despite all I've said, the XP interface isn't that bad in itself. I just need a bit more control over it (like the ability to change the colours) than I have. If Microsoft had spent time building a proper UI that could be altered by the user rather than being tied into 'themes' (read: we couldn't be arsed to refine the old interface so we designed some pretty graphics that could just be loaded and displayed leaving the user with limited customisation options) or even just designed a full set of colour schemes to go with the new interface, it would be better.
If they'd made the 'classic' interface a viable alternative, and not something which has clearly been designed to look like the poor relation to Luna, I'd still run XP.
As it is, I want to stay with the interface I like, whilst still enjoying the support for modern hardware and software which XP provides. At the present time, that means Windows 2000.
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