“I have some old programs on the XP that also work great but will not probably not work on newer platforms.”
Try running them on Linux using Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer that lets some Windows software, especially older versions, run on Linux. Some software even works better on Wine/Linux than on Windows.
http://www.winehq.org/
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29
I have some old programs on the XP that also work great but will not probably not work on newer platforms
Try running them on Linux using Wine.
If you are thinking of, or need to stay in a Windoze environment and positively don't want WinAte, keep in mind that both Win 7 Pro and Win 7 Ultimate have the 'run as XP' option not available on Win 7 Home. Whether that would work for any of the programs or hardware you have mentioned I don't know, but I do know it works here for an older scanner for which there are no Win 7 (or even Win Vista) drivers. It is at least something worth investigating.
On this end I'm either re-braining with Win 7 if the machine will handle it or going Linux. Have one desktop already on Linux (Mint 16) and one laptop ready to do a Win 7 install on.
And then there's the oddball that is fighting me but I'm pretty sure I can beat it into submission and get a Linux distro of some flavor on it. (Problem that has arisen is that it seems that to run off a Linux live DVD it wants to load the entire iso into ram so the libraries are available. This then maxs out the ram on this laptop and strange things happen. Something I'll get back to next week. Working on music for tomorrow right now.. ;-)