Well a well tweaked system without a bunch of stuff running resident in memory will run as fast as 2k. Some people differ on this, some don't, when you get down to it the OS is only as fast as the drivers and tweaking you do so tweak your system and try out different drivers and see what works best for you.

I noticed some of my games run a bit faster on win xp pro compared to win2k pro

winme is alot faster than winxp in many games, like colin mcrae rally 2, hostile waters, and return to castle wolf

WinME is the biggest piece of crap ever, its a regression when it comes to operating system, i would rather try and play games on an Apple IIe than a WinME system. Return to Wolfenstein runs better for me in XP than it did in crappy *** ME anyway.

winme is much faster then win2k in d3d games
 
my system:
duron 800@1000 superorb
geforce 2 pro 32mb (240/400)
asus a7v-133
384mb ram
seagate barracuda 3 30gb
win2k
 
drivers:
nvidia 12.41 official
via 4in1 432
liveware 3 for win2k
direct x 8
giants 1.4 patch
 
before i start i know opengl games like quake 3 is same speed, and 3dmark 2001 is same speed in both winme and win2k.
but many d3d games dont run fast on win2k, like giants and offroad (a very taxing good grapics racing game)
 
in win2k in giants my fps drops to bout 8-10fps in a big fight, and in winme the fps never falls below 23fps, even in HUGE fights where heaps of reapoers shoot at u.
 
i also noticed a big difference in fps in offroad, looking in www.ntcompatible.com forums, i see many people who find the same results
 
***************B4 ANYONE TELLS ME TO USE DET 4 DRIVERS, I HAVE ALREADY TRIED. THE SAME RESULTS**********