XP Home Edition provides only rudimentary control over permissions for folders and files. I found I was having to create folders with share permissions (to hold files used by asp routines that needed both read and write permissions). This had serious security implications, particularly as I was running the web server on my 'workhorse' PC. I simply couldn't afford it to be compromised.
I next re-commissioned a PC with a spec.* just about sufficient for XP Professional, and installed it.
Later still I built a new PC for everyday use and installed the web server on my original 'workhorse' PC (for spec. see 'First Steps'). Transferring the hard disk to the 'new' machine was initially a problem so I returned it to the 'old' PC and used the ASR technique described in Recovering XP
XP Pro provides 'granular' file permissions and is much better suited to operating IIS
* AMD K6-2/500, 192mb RAM