[Mister X]

I've had sp2 running for about 2 weeks now and haven't had any major problems. But I probably would wait to install it on a mission critical machine. I have had some small issues with file associations getting screwed up and some unexpected behaviours in a few programs. Especially programs that use shell extensions. Also I was getting quite a few error messages involving Dr. Watson and ICQ so I had to go in and disable error reporting. A lot of DVD/CD burning software seems to glitch after sp2 is installed and will need to be updated.

As far as improved security goes... I would recommend spending 50 bucks on a router and disabling the lame firewall. The windows firewall only monitors incoming traffic so if you have a trojan or some other thing sending traffic out it won't do anything about that. Which means that they will still be able to phone home.

The virus protection monitor is just a stupid little thing that checks to see if you have antivirus software installed. With a very few programs it can tell if you have it disabled or not. Probably not useful except to the extreme newbie.

The other thing is "improved" windows updates. MS is fairly aggressive in trying to get you to turn on automatic updates. They have also made changes to how Windows Update works from the website. It now requires 2 services that I could previously disable because they weren't being used. So it adds more bloat to the OS without giving any better functionality.

Overall the only difference most people will notice is the popup/script blocker in IE and a bunch of windows popping up to ask if it's okay for program x to access the internet.