imacom:
The Deal is, 2462 was more heavily tested (as is every public release). They are not allowed to sign off a public beta without it going through enough testing hours, and makig sure that all the big bugs that have been found are sqaused by release.
Granted, beta2 of WinXP seems to be worse on my hardware then say, 2458, which was werse than 2446 (which I think was the best build so far), but that's just on my hardware.