I give up.
Now downloading Windows 7. (Legally, I presume, unless Microsoft redirected me to a pirate site.) I still wonder if I ever got the CD for WinXP for that machine, but at least it had Genuine Windows XP. I thought I was smart, buying one of the last XP machines (after they were getting rare), and compared to Vista I was right. But for the last couple years every new piece of hardware and software has been made for Win7, and backward compatibility has crumbled.
I managed to install the XP from another machine's CD on the SSD, and it works fine. But only for 30 days. And there is the whole matter of XP doing unspeakable things to Solid-state Storage Devices. So it is this or buying another computer.
I managed to install the XP from another machine's CD on the SSD, and it works fine. But only for 30 days. And there is the whole matter of XP doing unspeakable things to Solid-state Storage Devices. So it is this or buying another computer.