Well, after many weeks of procrastination, I finally did it. I let Windows XP Service Pack 2 install.
I had hesitated for a couple of reasons. One was a couple of horror stories I'd read about SP2. Of course, I believe most of those horror stories came from people running, shall we say, non-standard versions of Windows XP.
And I wanted to be sure that all my data was decently backed up. So after copying most files over the network to my desktop, I also burned a few CD-Rs today. Normally I wouldn't be quite so paranoid about doing an upgrade, but I realized I would have some extra challenges with a laptop if I had trouble. If it were a desktop, I'd have the option of taking out a hard drive, and making it a secondary on another machine to get data off. But with the laptop, I don't really have that option. So I wanted to be safe.
I managed to clean up some space just as the SP2 install was loading. It turned out well, as SP2 used up about 850M on my hard