I went back to linux a while back after a break of 15 years, and went with linux mint.

My pc had xp installed, and was fully partitioned, I just emptied one of the partitions and the linux installer resized that partition and freed up space to install on. Everything worked straight away. stuff like sharing my printer to windows machines and using my N95 as a modem. All that stuff worked straight away. So I must say I was mightily impressed.

I'm not saying it will work that great for you, but it did for me. Also, my xp installation was unaffected, and works as before.