You already have VPC from MS. I've used both it and VM. VPC seems to boot and shutdown much faster.

>What do I need to do to be able to have another environment on my laptop that is totally stripped and has just the most basic windows? I need to be able to boot up or login to a separate Windows session and test EXEs as if I'm our QA dept or on a client PC. Need it to be as unintrusive as possible to my current setup and only need to have a couple things beyond the most basic Windows setup. XP if that matters.