Problem installing VMware, so adding Virtual Box

I have an old version of Corel Draw (V8) that I wanted to use for a file to use for laser etching, and it would not work right on windows 7. A google search tells me that this cannot be resolved. I also have some legal Windows XP serial numbers from machines that are no longer being used, so I wanted to run XP on a virtual machine. I have successfully used VMware Reader in the past for this, but it would not install, after fiddling with it for a while, I decided to try the VirtualBox from Oracle, which, like VMware Reader, is free for personal use. This turned out to work fine.

Installing Windows XP

I have not yet figured out how to use the optical drive directly from the virtual machine, but it is easy to use an ISO file as a virtual drive. I downloaded an ISO of a Windows XP Home bootable installation disk with the SP3 updates already installed. These are pretty easy to find, but one must be careful about where they are coming from to avoid security issues. VirtualBox has an installation wizard that will boot from the ISO file and install Windows. For a legal installation, it will ask for a serial number. I used one from an old laptop I had converted to linux. Note: I tried first to use the serial number from a decommissioned Windows XP pro machine, but it did not work; you apparently need to use a number from the right version of the OS even though XP Pro was the more expensive version.