Hi Jim,

If you are interested in ReactOS, the first place where to look at is our website at www.reactos.org. There is a screenshot section, but please keep in ming that the screenshots are partly outdated. There is also a forum, where you will probably find more recent screenshots from users and all kinds of information. This is also a good place to ask questions.
If you like to, you can easily install one of our recent releases or one of the daily builds (download links are on the front page) in a virtual machine, like VMWare, VirtualBox, Quemu. etc.
The installation takes less than a minute and is very easy. It is currently not recommended to install ReactOS on a production machine, since it currently only supports FAT32 (NTFS in work in progress) and could potentially cause problems with an already installed system. We also have mailing lists and IRC channels, where you can ask your questions,  more details can be found on the website in the Community section.
The GUI currently resembles the XP gui relativley closely. In the default installation the "classic" theme is active, but we also support XP style theming and one theme is provided with the OS, others can be downloaded from other sites and installed.
Regarding the registry: we are forced to follow the MS design relatively closely to make sure applications work as they work on Windows. The possibility of not having to reinstall programs would need major changes to the registry code. At the current state of development this is not a planned feature, but additional features like that could be added, if someone with the required knowledge could implement it without breaking application compatibility.

Regards,
Timo Kreuzer

Am 19.12.2014 um 00:01 schrieb Cact25@aol.com: