Walter,
>And yes, VM-ware, or virtual servers will always be an alternative, though performance still has something to be desired. But of course 10 years will be enough to address this issue as well.

one of the CD's (yupp, CD, not DVD) I have for worst case scenarios has Dos Word, Quattro, Turbo Pascal (even if you only need a editor) FPD/FPW, Excel 4 and Word for Window 2 - things you can still run in 16-bit environments. Has room to spare and starts like a greased monkey even on sesaoned HW. Even non-XEN VM's will be fast enough for such environments. In NT days we had a stable OS (ok, rebooting when installing) missing

antivirus (I use a non MS product)
firewall (I use a non MS product)
USB (this would be really bad for me today)
remoting software (I currently use non and MS product)
stable multi screen support

some things were a PITA back then, but I think the latest bloats of our system drives just show that there was nothing really useful added - just slowness and eye candy<g>.

Give the VM a nearly dedicated core, enough memory and old programs - you'ld be amazed.

regards

thomas