I've been trying to work out how to get a copy of Windows XP to run in a VM at work – not that I actually want one as such, but it's useful to have for those Word documents that OpenOffice won't open, and for the occasional website that requires IE. The machine I'm using was supplied with Windows, and has an XP license sticker on it, with a license key. This would seem, on the face of it, to be fairly straightforward.

After some digging, I arrive at what seems to be the relevant place on our internal systems services website. We apparently have a site license for Windows and Office for the whole organisation. This is good. The MS Campus Agreement allows me to install Windows and Office on a University PC, which is what I want. So I follow the link for "Installation Instructions"…