Difficulty Level: Stealing Candy from small Children.

Im going to compress what took me 3 days into about an hour of your time.

Step 1: Go get (and install) a copy of Virtual Box.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Its Like vmware or virtual pc but its free and works great. I chose amd64 on windows as a host os. It didnt care that im using an intel processor, but if your using a 32 bit processor you will want that one instead. Get whatever your host os is.  I’m told that vmware and/or virtualpc have free versions available, but I have not investigated this.  It theory it shouldn’t matter, so use whatever you want.

Step 2: Use N-lite on your copy of xp to remove wmp from the install. You can also get rid of a lot of unnecessary junk and make the xplite machine boot and run smooth and fast.

http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

Alternatively you can go download a copy of tinyxp (legal as long as you own a copy of xp… people give me old pcs so i have a stack of cdkeys in a drawer somewhere). If you go the tiny xp route make sure the install you choose doesnt have wmp installed on it. Im not linking any tinyxp dls for obvious reasons.

Step 3: Set up virtual box with the basics. Nothing special here. Make sure you have a network adapter set up and set it to nat. I gave mine a 10 gig hd and 512 megs of ram. Also make sure you have a shared folder with full access. Under cd-rom, select image and choose the image file for your xp install or tiny xp image file (ie xplite.iso or whatever you named yours). Start the emulation and install xp onto the box.

if your guest os network adapter throws an error (check the device manager) change the image file in the cd drive to the vboxguestaddons.iso file, and in device manager hit update driver and goto cdrom drive(most likely D)\32Bit\Windows\3rdParty\AMD_PCnet and use that driver.
Also autoplay (install the addons) as it allows things like seamless transition from host to guest os with the mouse.

To get to your shared folder (on virtual machine) goto network places, entire network, virtualbox shared folders, and then i like to right click on the folders and hit map network drive… it puts it in the my computer section for ease of access. Dump all your necessary download files into this folder (on host machine) and drag them to desktop on guest machine. You can also use your browser on guest os to download directly.

We will refer to your desktop pc as the host os and the virtual one running inside virtual box as the guest os.
Restart guest os.