If industry sources are getting this right, there won't be a service pack for Windows XP till 2007. Though it is not as bad as sounds, SP2 released in August 2004 is already "outdated" with plenty of patches, which were released after wards.

Microsoft seems to be clearly spending more time on "Vista", and that might mean only one thing for Windows geeks - "Upgrade to Windows Vista, or die". Okay, may be we are just  over reacting... you always have choices like Linux :)