I understand that XP Home has always been a bit unstable.
Is that still the case?
I've been running both Home and Pro since they came out and both have been very stable - not quite as bombproof as Linux*, but as good as NT3.5/4/Win2k and far better than Win 9x/Me. It also seems better at surviving an application crashing on it than 2k, which occasionally dies in sympathy (Microsoft Money is a particularly good Win2k killer
).
In my experience many (possibly most) problems blamed on the OS are due to cheap hardware and/or dodgy drivers rather than the OS itself - even the blue-screen king Win Me is fairly stable on a good quality box. It's not better than 'fairly' though
I wouldn't say Pro was any more stable than Home, but I guess that it's more likely to be run on a low-budget cheap-hardware games box which might make it appear to be more unsable.
* in seven years of using assorted flavours of Linux I've never seen a kernel panic
