Ya. The only risk are viruses. BTW, MSE is no longer supported.
Well since the XP boxes can’t run the new IE the virus risk is pretty minimal, add a good firewall for the company and virus scanner for the desktops and it’s a non-issue. And really in business nobody upgrades the OS on machines, you get a new machine. Since computers depreciate in 4 years there’s no reason to upgrade the OS in place. If they machine is less than 4 years old it doesn’t have XP, if it’s old enough to have depreciated out a long time ago and it’s at least 2 generations of hardware behind the curve, get your people new hardware and make your accountants earn their money.
The new security software for Win 8 and 8.1 is a new *Windows Defender*, seems to work pretty good and is supposedly better than MSE.
Been using Win 8.1 on my new machine, only a day and a half of cussing before I got a handle on it and it ain't bad at all, faster compared to Win 7 and XP.