I installed a second harddrive, installed Vista on the primary, XP on the other, and if I don’t wish to use Vista I hit ‘F10’ on startup and choose the secondary harddrive as the boot drive for that session.
It looks like, from what others said, that my son will have to run 32-bit XP and not 64-bit in order access the network. Why in the world 64-bit won't run is beyond me but Microsoft has done dumber things over the years (ME anyone?)