The RC2 candidate of SP2 is a grand improvement on the previous builds. My PC is stable, the firewall does what it's advertised as doing and memory usage is at an all time low, 30 Processes and using 192MB of mem.
Admittedly it's a fresh installation with only a few of my usual apps runing but the OS as a whole is fine. It's only when i start adding AntiVirus and additional firewalls that things get screwy- but that's the respective software designers fault- NOT MS's. MS has done a lot of work to get to this stage it's now upto the company's like Symantec and McAffee to get their software to use as little resources as possible instead of the BloatWare they are currently pumping out.
Give it a go KC- it's pretty damn painless
