I always thought it was hideous, but I liked that it stood apart from Mac OS X rather than copying it. I think the Royale theme was nicer than Luna and somewhat wish it had become the new theme from Service Pack 2 onwards.

As for the icons, I liked them but they could look a bit unclear as to what they were supposed to represent. Windows ME's icons looked a bit clearer, but even those were styled a bit bizarrely to me: soft-rounded edges for icons that basically looked exactly liked the hard-edged Windows 95 icons.

What I think were better than XP's icons themselves were XP-inspired icons that came out at the same time, bringing a bit of polish to icons that were still using only 16 colours in a 16x16 resolution.