Is it still crashing?

People dont realise that is definitely a difficult / frustrating job lying ahead of them from as soon as that drive formats, all programs and drivers that used to be are now gone, its a job putting everything back the way it was. Definitely worth it though as the performance increases dramatically.

Yeah, Im the same regarding Firefox, it is 10 times better and more stable than IE.

You mentioned something about SP1, I build pc's regularly and everytime I finish the XP install, I stick on SP2 straight away, as its got a better driver support and contains most of the critical updates in one install rather than about 40+ different ones & then SP2.

I bet everything is working smoothly since you re-installed windows!? The problems you were describing sound to me to be registry related, Did you use any form of registry cleaner or do you manually setup your registry through "regedit" during the time your pc was crashing ?