Plan for Rig

[Fender16]

Upon returning from deployment I plan on buying myself a nice "Welcome Home" present.
What better than a top of the line monster rig?

I have been building my own computers for about 6 years so this is nothing new to me.
However I do have a question as this wasn't a concern of mine last time I built a rig.

I am planning on having 2 HDDs ( 1 TB ea.) and 1 SSD (64-128 gig range). My plan is to have Windows 7 64x Bit on the SSD and all the programs I plan on using with Win7 on one HDD.
With the other 1 TB HDD, I want to put XP with a few old school programs/ games so avoid the whole OS compatibility mess.

My question mainly lies with drivers. Having different drivers for the same hardware being run by a different OS at any given time. Is this possible?
I think I remember hearing one of the versions of Win7 comes with an "XP Mode". Does it truly emulate WinXP?

Suggestions welcome.

PS, In case you were wondering, I will be building an AM3+ Bulldozer rig... assuming it's finally out by early August.

[BaldEagl]

Each set of drivers will reside on the same drive/partition that the OS does and threfore won't cause a problem.  You will have to install drivers for both OS's though every time you update drivers.

[cattb]

IMO I think I would let the bulldozer get on the market for a little while, just in case there is any problems which were not recognized to begin with. Just example, the Sandy Bridge motherboard problems, the early AMD quad core problems.

Hopefully ther Bulldozer will be out soon, I'm curious to see the new CPU.

[Ghosth]

Its called dual boot, and with that setup you could easily run 3-5 different OS's.

Just partition that Terrabyte drive, install XP first (general rule is oldest OS first) Then do win 7 on a clean partition.

One minor note, Win 7 likes to be on C:/windows, to the point that it will rearrange drive letters to make it be that way. So put XP on D or E, it will be fine and happy there.

[guncrasher]

just something I havent read about.  if you record films on ssd which is on your ssd drive, will it be good for it or bad?  i mean that's a lot of writing to ti.

semp