I think I may have pinpointed the problem. If your IT tech needs to "find a vendor" - that's no tech.
I maintain a small network and its hardware for a family run business, strictly self taught. And I'm convinced that with $3,000 and a Newegg login I could buy or build, and image from a given XP system, five reasonably fast-performing desktops inside of a week, since I doubt that current gaming-grade CPU and GPU are called for.
Now, if your wife's big dollar lab gear requires a custom hardware interface - a specialized card or dongle - then indeed, that ratchets up the complexity bigtime and she has every right to raise hell with the hardware supplier.
But absent that I see no reason why this process should be excessively costly or time consuming.
How many man-hours did it take you to get to your current level of expertise (which, I assure you, most small businesses do NOT have)?? That time comes directly out of billable hours.
It takes time and effort away from the money-making parts of the operation. Multiply it by the (probably) tens or hundreds of thousands of times a year it happens, and it adds up to big money, and is not acceptable.
And it "used" to be the main advantage that Microsoft had over Apple. Microsoft at least made an effort to "try" to assure some level of legacy support. With Apple, it was "legacy??....tough cookies, baby". With Windows 8 Microsoft tried to be Apple, and the customers are simply telling them to go to hell.
I think the solution I propose will reduce the pain and uncertainty of the end user by a few orders of magnitude, and give Microsoft a huge leg up with its customer base.
Specialized lab equipment interfaces can be a real hassle to deal with. If the vendor goes out of business or quits supporting it after a period of time the best thing to do is have an identical cloned computer ready to go. I know of equipment that is still running and controlled by NT4 SP5.