With Microsoft discontinuing support of XP and XP being limited to Direct X 9.0 (which causes graphic driver glitches for modern cards), I have migrated my XP machines to Win 7 64-bit Pro and couldn’t be happier. On top of that I can run XP as a virtual machine if I need older apps that are incompatible with Win 7. I have ran several of these machines for a few years to a few months and have yet to see a BSOD.
Simply follow the rule of getting every other operating system from Microsoft and you will be good. After the disaster of Windows ME we got XP, after VISTA we got 7, after 8 we will get something decent. Why these guys follow this pattern and can’t seem to learn from their own history would make for an interesting case study for a business class.