I just wanted to post my thoughts at this stage on a few weeks of use of the HTPC software
XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Centre).

In short: It's frustrating.

I will amalgamate all my issues to do with my HTPC hardware, attempts with Boxee software, and now XBMC into one longer post at some near future point, but for today wanted to share thoughts on XBMC so far.
My video library is a fair size, with various TV and Films stored on my NAS.
XBMC is able to read all of these well (once I had learnt how better to name and label the files), which are 'scraped' by XBMC using plugins to various online databases (IMDB, The Open Movie DB, The TV DB etc) and pulling relevant metadata, pictures, fanart, logos etc. All very cool stuff.

For a while all was well, however my current frustrations have materialised once I have tried to have more than 1 profile (ie think 'login' for Windows) - 1 for me, 1 for my son, so that he only has access to his stuff, and I can see everything.

The problem appears to be a bug (i think) and therefore hopefully will be resolved, but what is happening is that periodically XBMC 'forgets' that a profile exists.
(I am currently running XBMC software on top of WinXP SP3).
It boots up, and suddenly any files / metadata attached to relevant profiles no longer exist

I have since learned how to export and import profile video xml data which has been a life saver, but am just about ready to jump ship from running on top of XP3 and try XBMC live instead, in the hope that it wont repeat this issue.

Has anyone else had similar issues? I will trawl the XBMC forum for more specific help with this, but my feeling at this time is one of frustration since it is such a pretty environment and when it works it is close to brilliant, but having to mess about in a Windows environment, reboot occasionally, muck about with profiles.... all in all its not the most wife-friendly thing, whilst i'm trying to persuade her that its all better than my old Western Digital Live media player.