XP vs Ubu | Servers

I need my boxes running constantly to facilitate services that need to keep running. However occasionally I also need to task my XP server with an application now and again. This should be ok because i've got better hardware in my XP box than my linux (linux does more with less). All was well and good in XP land until I added the .net frame work and silverlight. I went from over 30 days uptime to crashing 3 times in one day. I have made more drastic configuration changes to my apache box with not so much as a restart! If I could pull the changes out of my XP box I would but I'll need the app for another 2 months.