Other than my ancient printer (HP LaserJet IIIP) and a relatively-old monitor that has more display modes than WinXP seems to think it has, the rest of my stuff is of recent vintage. I haven't run into any real problems with XP (other than some of my old DOS games absolutely hate newer elements of my system.
The software we had to use was called Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 .. any lower version won't work
I had an external CD Writer and a card reader for my digital camera and we couldn't get winXP to recognize them until we loaded up that software
Gabz .. I'm not sure this is the same kind of problem you are having but it may give you a direction to look into
Maybe some computer guys/gals around here can help you better