Thanks Microsoft

It is nice when a company recognizes that decisions they made many years ago no longer make sense. Reinstalled XP this evening with the retail disk I have laying around but could not activate since the key is OEM. Such a bother they ever set this up. Well there is a tool for fixing this, go to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/help/genuine/product-key and choose the XP tab, install the tool enter the key and everything should be good.