VMWare approach
I wondered how deep I would have to dig in the forum before finding someone whu used the VMWare approach.
It worked fine for me, too.
When the transferred system was first started up, it did ask to go through the validation process again however, because the hardware had changed. But since the old laptop wasn't trashed yet, I was still able to copy the key information off the sticker and that process went without any further complaints.
This has also saved the problem of a couple of programs that won't run under Vista (I haven't used my W7 upgrade disk yet). Although both of those programs are still active, their companies stopped supporting them after XP.
