harrytoole, as to your comment, I dissagree...
Of course if you run a misson critical server for a large organisation, playing mafia on it 24/7 isnt a good idea... Then again if your running a mission critical server, you wouldnt be running windows on it in the first place
The thing is I can see why for power users .NET is a better choice than XP. Theres more options to play around with. Terminal services supports concurent use by several users, IIS supports hosting multiple sites, built in servers for streaming media etc... A lot of features power users can find useful... and if its just for home use/experimenting, why the hell follow an unwritten rule that its either a 100% stable server, or if you want to run games you canr run IIS?