The most imporant threat to any machine is social engineering, which turns you into the virus that damages your machine. No operating system will ever be immune to that.
My XP machine is not for surfing the web, although it does that. It is strictly for assessing the actual harmfulness of running XP behind the software you don't trust. So far it has been uninvaded by bad guys after 24 hours a day and over 9 months. It's a canary, to penetrate the hype and doomsaying and answer the question "How foolish is it to run XP for non-critical home use?" The answer so far is that it is absolutely routine.
Again, just about every very harmful thing that has happened in the past year has been the result of social engineering and man in the middle internet scams which work no matter how "safe" your operating system is. If you give someone the password to your bank account he can get your money and it doesn't matter if you're running Windows, Linux, OS10, iOS, Android, VMS, DOS 3.3 or an abacus. Crooks have discovered that the easiest way to open a door is to ask you to do it in the most persuasive way. And it has been amazing how eager people have been to be their own virus.
The safety of your operating system is magnitudes less important than your own behavior.
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