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.. ;-)
I’ll confess. I fear all this monkeying with my working computer. What I know about all this Linux, Wine, Mint, Win7 Pro/Ultimate, etc is what I just wrote in this sentence......nothing more. Life is so nice turning the computer on and happily and effectively using my functional XP, Office 97, Firefox or IE, Photoshop, a half dozen weekly hackercrap-finding, and a dozen or so old very useful and functional programs. Right now my life does not need this frustration and assured outrage.
What do I fear? I try to load some major brain content transplant and the computer boots to a blue screen with lines on nonsensical words and numbers. Then as I load the programs I love, they won’t work. In comparison to the average person, I’m probably have good technical abilities but the years of experience practicing those abilities have established my FEAR.