I wanted to alert the community to an issue and solution; forgive me if you already know this.
My new dual-boot Vadim has a Killer NIC card. In an unusual reversal of the norm, it has worked well with Vista but has caused serious problems with XP. In Vista I have seen ping and frame-rate improvements (about 15% in Company of Heroes - the limit of my testing so far).
In XP, driver installation led to repeated BSODs seconds after appearance of desktop. The Killer NIC driver was obviously the problem and my first thought was to re-boot in safe-mode and remove the Killer (no pun intended) driver. However, in the boot screen it appeared that I could F8 into Vista safe-mode, but there was no such option for XP. I now understand this to be a common issue with dual boot configs: the "primary" OS appears to have a safe-mode but not the secondary.
In fact, safe-mode is accessible for the secondary (XP) OS BUT, you have to mash F8 within nanoseconds of hitting "enter" to start the XP boot. I tried this a few times and was quick enough on the 4th or 5th attempt and, hey presto, safe-mode. Removing the Killer driver fixed the problem. I haven't yet found a Killer driver that will work (there have been several versions) but will post again when and if I find the right one. If anyone knows the answer, that wd be much appreciated.
On a separate note (and plug for Vadim!) I was very comforted by having my set-up on an X-image drive: if the above fix had not worked I at least had the x-image in reserve.
