It's the first Windows operating system I could do work on. It's stable on the order of days, which I need
While I'll give you much better stability than XP, as JMad would say... c'mon son! What precisely do you do that XP wasn't stable enough for? And did you try to trace the cause of your instabilities? Because honestly, while XP isn't as stable as Vista or 7, it's not like it just randomly BSODs for no reason like 9x used to.
Unless updates come in, and then it forces you to reboot. Hopefully that's changed.
There are policies in the gpedit.msc in XP that you could set to prevent that:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.htmlSpecifically option 2. I'm not trying to be a dick but I find it hard to believe that you couldn't have found that yourself in 15 seconds on Google.
Also, it ate my GRUB, so I have to install a bootloader all over again.
Funny, I always nag about Linux eating my Windows bootloader