Testing took a few days and it remained fine in that time. It was of course behind a firewall the whole time. Also, the first thing I did was install an alter

Testing took a few days and it remained fine in that time. It was of course behind a firewall the whole time. Also, the first thing I did was install an alternative browser. So long as you don't let any MS client app talk to the Internet, it's not _that_ bad. I started with an old version of SeaMonkey, installed from USB, and then bootstrapped to newer browsers from there. There are current 3rd party antivirus and firewall apps, and even with antivirus, XP is _startlingly_ fast compared to even Win7, and 7 is faster than 8 which is faster than 10 which is faster than 11.