Are you up on Microsoft licensing?
I believe it used to be the case that if you owned a license for a more recent OS / higher level OS, you were legal to run something earlier. In other words, if you held a Win98 license you could run Win95, if you had a Win2K license, you could run NT 4.0, that sort of thing.
Does that still apply today? Has anyone tried to get a WinXP install verified based on holding a Vista license?
I haven’t, but I’ve read that is okay (legal) to downgrade to XP if you have Vista Premium or Business. A Google search should return many hits. Best of luck. My new notebook (ordered yesterday) will come with XP. You can still get XP on a new machine if you order online through Dell. Or through a couple of other OEMs.