>>I hope you have a spare machine. With plenty of juice.
>
>I run Vista full-time at home:
>- Athlon 64-3000+
>- 512 megs of RAM
>- 256meg graphic card (to run Areo advanced) my 128 meg card was fine for Areo basic

That sounds like a very reasonable machine. To tell you the truth, those specs are what I would consider lower-end for XP, besides your CPU. I wouldn't run less than 512 MB RAM in XP, and I guess a video card is different for different people.

I wouldn't run XP SP2 with all the necessary software on a 5 year old computer and expect good results, so I don't know why people make a fuss when Vista won't run on it either.