I have personally installed SP2 on four home computers.  I have five friends that I know have also installed it.  Only 1 had problems, necessitating the removal of SP2, and he by far had the most unusual configuration (with RAID harddrives and the like).

My experiance was a total breeze.  I backed up data just to be careful, but I didn't need it as the installation was flawless on each machines (I used the big 260mb full installer).

If you have the backup of your data you might actually considering doing a clean install.  Just boot to the XP CD, delete the current partition, reformat, and start anew (it's rather easy).  Your call though.

In any case, I'm betting like the great majority of people, you won't have any problems

"You kind of wonder if they over tweaked their system or put some bad software on the hard drive that caused the problems with the Service Patch ( SP-2)"  I wouldn't be a bit suprised.  SP2 on two PCs - no problems. 

to be honest ive had a successful install of XPSP2 across all of the pcs ive installed it on bar one.

it seems like XP Home users have the best of the features the differences to Pro dont seem that great.

All of my companies XP machines are now patched and upgraded. the only problems i have found are incompatibilities with D600 - Bluetooth and PROset. both are resolved by using windows native drivers rather than dell ones. the other issue is still outstanding - if you have XP firewall enabled you cannot currently use Cisco VPN because it uses some irregular connection methods and the firewall just blocks it, so just lower the firewall whilst using a VPN connection (im told this issue is going to be addressed in the next release of Cisco VPN client, time will tell!

Thanks for the replies everyone. I may wait a while till I find a good way of backing up, because currently my backups are on the other computer and the other computer's backups are on my computer. I do not use any firewall because both computers are networked through a Linksys hardware router.

Thanks, John Paul.