Beginner Budget build - what mother board/CPU?

[Slugbait]

Who knows, MS might even take down the update servers.

IIRC, those same servers update the newer operating systems.

They no longer serve updates to XP SP2 machines right now, because SP2 is unsupported.

That is not exactly correct. You log on to Windows Update with SP1, they serve an update to SP2, then serve an update to SP3. In other words, KB patching is unsupported in SP2, but SP patching will likely always be supported (and then the newer KB patches for the latest SP). You'll likely still be able to download the package from download.microsoft.com, too...for example, get SP2 for W2K here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=8862

But otherwise, yeah...extended support for XP ends in (almost exactly) 2.5 years from today. Except that support has been extended for XP...was it twice? Or three times? A decision on another support extension will depend on their customer base in about two years from now...and I'm not talking about their customers who hang out here.