All my development and personal machines run on Windows 2003 Server rather than XP as I find this to be much more stable. However there are a few things that are annoying and I would prefer to be without. This site

http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/

shows how to make your Win 2003 act more like an XP box. My personal favourites are

disabling the shutdown event tracker

http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/shutdown.htm

and improving graphics performance

http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/hardwareacc.htm

I'm still working on the last one so that I can get Age Of Empires working on my laptop