I run VMWare Fusion on my Mac. XP rarely crashes that way (runs really fast, too) and I can run the good version of QuickBooks. Best of both worlds.
Yep, that's the ticket. Been using Fusion since it was a beta (and have used VMware Workstation on Windows since 2005).
I have a couple of huge ESX boxes at work, running about a dozen VM'ed servers each. ESX costs an arm and a leg. But I've been playing with ESXi, the free version, which is only missing a few high-end features like VMotion, but also (sadly) USB support. Great for servers, terrible for user workstations. But it runs like a bat outta hell... no "standard OS" in the way, just the thin VMware ESX shim between the VM and the hardware.