Well... I have something working but went another way about it.
I did some hardware testing and stripped the notebook apart for some much needed cleaning. It amazes me how dog/cat fur can reach places it should never be... Anyway the hardware testing and visual inspection all look good. Unfortunately after installing the new drives and clean Win 7 install I still got the same result as before. :\
So decided to try another VM. Removed Virtual PC and installed the free VMWare 7 Player. Using the same XP_Mode image from VPC and the problems are now gone. Olly aaand X32_dbg
- both run smooth again. So I dunno what the problem is with VPC. Guessing a conflict with the Intel chipset driver or a MS update. VMWare player seems to be running XP Mode much faster. Guess I'll stick with it instead. Thx - jack