If you google the application and linux you should find the official line about what distros have been tested / certified or are formally supported for each application.
What distro you go for may depend on the level of compatability / support you actually need.
Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu would be other candidates.
Regarding boot order - you should always load Windows first, as XP is not considerate of other OS's!
I would suggest XP 32, XP 64 then Linux as the install order.
I assume you are au fait with file system selection - NTFS is still not officially and reliably writeable under linux.
SD