For what its worth, I upgraded my five yr old laptop (against Dell's advice) from 98 to XP Pro last year, had problems initially that needed a HD format to sort out - can't blame XP.
Since then its been just about bulletproof, I use it around the globe and it never gives the kind of grief 98 did when connecting to a network or plugging something new into the machine.
A previous poster alluded that XP home may not be as robust, if you can stretch to it go for the Pro version - its good.
PS Blacksheep, don't you mean NTFS?