I could probably lay my hands on a copy of XP but what about WGA? At the moment my XP Pro is genuine, paid for and registered to my computer and I am loth to pay for another new version of Windows, which would be different from what is on this my main computer, when I seem to have no problems with what I've got (if only I could keep my hands off it!). I really don't want WGA issues with Microsoft either.
To say that I have been fiddling with it for a year gives a wrong impression! I used to turn it on every week to update Avast and a few other things and then would turn it off again. Once in a while I would go on to do something else before turning it off and, of those a few times when I had time, I'd root about a bit for half an hour or so. So, during that "year", I probably devoted an hour or two to attempting to tidy the hard drive up.