Because I had such great experience in the past with VirtualBox I downloaded and installed VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1 recently. And I must say that it just works flawlessly! 1. The Installation after downloading the Files was really fast, then 2. My Windows XP is as fast as anything I could imagine. I can actually have my Linux and my Windows XP running at the same time with no performance problems whatsoever with 2 GB of RAM. Ok I got one of those Intel SSDs (160GB) that might make a difference but I really give VirtualBox my thumbs-up and Qemu my Thumbs-Down, including my toes! I tried to use Qemu for a long time but (between the VirtualBox versions 1.5 and 3.0) and for the mean time I am back to VirtualBox because it is such a real pleasure to use it! Thank you VirtualBox! Thank you to DownloadSquad for pointing this out to me.