Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released with little fanfare on Wednesday and the usual panopoly of bugs and incompatibilities are rearing their heads through the latter part of the week as people upgrade, according to buzz in the Windows XP support groups on Microsoft's website.

There appear to particularly be issues with the service pack on some computers running AMD's popular Athlon processors, but it's unlikely that this will affect most corporate installations, which remain heavily Intel-based despite AMD gains in the general market. Nonetheless, the usual degree of intensive testing is probably called for before rolling out a fresh XP service pack in your environment. On the other hand, if you're going to be making the jump to Vista instead of gutting it out with XP waiting for Windows 7, you may save yourself some problems by skipping SP3 and accelerating your Vista testing and roll-out. Much of SP3 is "nice to have" rather than "need to have;" it does a good job of stabilizing XP for it's twilight period after the scheduled June 30 discontinuation of the product, but if you're already running it comfortably there's nothing in SP3 you have to rush out and have in the near-term.