I've already talked about the financial reasons why XP probably isn't for your network, but I didn't really go into what's new and improved in XP's networking. So let me take care of that. First things first. XP's inherent networking improvements are nothing to write home about. If you want to deploy XP on your network as a replacement for your Win9x clients, you should be getting it for its vastly improved stability, not for its networking features. Of course, XP does have some improvements; I just don't consider them all that important. For example, XP's Remote Desktop and XP Help and Support Center do give users and administrators remote control of their desktop computers from any networked computer. I'd be more excited by this if that functionality hadn't been around for years in such consumer products as Symantec's pcAnywhere 10. And for my money, I'd rather work with the battled tested and more full-featured pcAnywhere 10.0 than Remote Desktop 1.0 any day. I'm also a wee bit worried about the hacking potential of a client operating system that has remote control built in.