I have been running WinXP SP1 for at least 18 months with no problems whatsoever. No compatibility issues with any of my other applications (there are quite a few of them).

I also have a corporate firewall from Kerio which has served me well.

Question is this: Should I upgrade to SP2 and turn on the "connect me to M$ every ten minutes" function that may mess my system up or leave it as is?

With all of these new security patches emerging are the auto updates absolutely essential nowdays or is my firewall enough to keep the nasties at bay? I really dont want a load of compatibility issues and errors that are likely to crop up by installing all of these patches/service packs/updates, the system is running fine as is.

Thanks for your thoughts!