XFCE may look superficially like XP but actually has all sorts of differences that make it irritating as hell to use. Just off the top of my head:
- No decent file explorer. Thunar is abysmal compared to XP's.
- Window borders too small, like 1px. Resizing windows is a pain.
- Window maximize behaviour is annoying, because you can still drag the window out of fullscreen after it's been maximized, yet dragging it to the top of the screen doesn't automatically fullscreen the window again.
- The 2 clipboards, one of which is a "mouse buffer", is so unintuative I would classify it as a bug. Linux desperately needs a unified clipboard.
- The start menu (yeah Win8 did away with it but it's bringing it back) is a nightmare. On Windows, its contents can be organized by easily drag/dropping, and generally the programs listing reflects somewhere on the file system. On Linux, no drag/drop, .desktop files all over the place to edit if you want to modify stuff, and the menu editor is broken (like "move up" and "move down" don't work)
Cinnamon or KDE might be better.