I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Office XP on my primary work machine today, primarily for a lack of anything better to do :-). I was a bit apprehensive, because Office 2000 had been working well for me so far (and I am very wary of letting unstable stuff onto this machine). Still.

The Good News so far: Installation was smooth - much more responsive than the Office 2000 installation. All Office apps now start up very fast — quite a bit faster than Office 2000, which was no slouch itself.

The Bad News: I run Windows 2000, and upgrading Office 2000 to Office XP killed my thumbnail views in Windows Explorer. This is a known issue — if you’re running any flavor of Windows 2000 and upgrading to Office XP, there’s a chance that thumbnail views for graphics files may stop working after you upgrade or remove your old version of Photo Editor. The workaround is here.

Further Bad News: IE (IE5.5 SP1) started behaving erratically. New windows (even ones I created by shift-clicking) did not show content, they just sort of hung with an empty frame. Installing IE5.5 SP2 solved the problem.

Maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead — but I’m thinking of installing Visio 2002 while I’m at it :-).