I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware.

Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it.

It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.