My point (which everyone apparently missed) was that WinXP is NOT a good gaming platform. I used to run Win2000, which *was* an excellent platform. The only games Win2000 couldn't run contained odd memory management (FF7, FF8) or were simply f***-old. Everything else it ran, stable as hell. Now I switched to XP, and not only lots of games stop working, a lot of my programs too! I'm happy that I can still program in MSVC++...
And for everyone's information, I have yet to see an app which starts working by messing with the oh-so-advanced compatibility settings. In my opinion, Win2000 is the best system, on all accounts. I very much regret I ever installed XP, it's a walking disaster when it comes to compatibility.