Thank you - I was worried about system file overwrite during the installation. I'll take your advice about the Office 2003 trial, and I've installed AVG anti-virus (free version), and ZoneAlarm (after disabling the XP firewall). I'm still having issues with Explorer locking the desktop on a regular basis, and Googling the issue yields no fix results. Seems it is a common problem with SP2... got any ideas about that? Or should I ask in another forum?
Thanks again in advance!