Windows XP went end of life in 2014, but a lot of people still use it.
There was a website that was a collection of all the best practices that put into a single site called Music dot Net, the URL is now owned by someone else but there is an archive of MusicXP dot Net here. I suggest following everything on that site to a T. If you can't make it work, then upgrade your system to Windows 7 32-Bit SP1 for the next best 32-Bit performance as it will load most of what could be loaded in XP, and the performance for memory management is much better.
