man I think way to many ppl are using Winblows XP to run an L2 server... XP is a consumer grade operating system.. NOT a server one... I reccomend Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Advanced Server. They both run servers SSOOO much better than xp! XP is NOT designed to handle server loads.. my Windows Server 2003 boxes dont crash like xp would have been doin.. swhich OS's then install SQL....
Actually I installed it on Windows 2003 this morning , n everything ran perfectly, only Windows 2003 crashed lol. So I decide to go back to XP, only then I had that ^ , + some of my hardware doesn't really work with 2003 hmm.