In other news, XP seems not to like to boot if the USB DVD drive is attached. Perhaps that is a BIOS problem, though the freeze up (or big slowdown that drives me nuts so that I press ctrl-alt-delete rather than tear my remaining hairs out) is during Windows boot and not during BIOS shenanigans. Plus Windows has no problem if you attach the drive later. I don’t want to upgrade my BIOS needlessly (the last BIOS upgrade that I applied to this computer having a bug so that I had to power cycle the CMOS by taking the computer apart to pull out and put back in the battery, according to instructions Kristy found with Google), so it may be simply that I have to detach or turn off this drive to boot into Windows.
Fortunately I use Windows so rarely that I don’t even bother keeping my HW clock set for local time (instead of the preferable UTC), so that when I do log into Windows I am transported into the future.