Yep, that seems to be the solution I read the most about. Unfortunately, the thoughtful folks at Hewlett Packard designed my computer in such a way that XP is preloaded and protected on the hard-drive. There's no installation or recovery disk so there's no way to put XP back on in order to dual-boot. It's supposed to be self-healing if anything happened to the OS, at least that's what the kind folks at tech support say. (they're very polite about it...but the core message is: forget it.)
Anyone else with XP pre-installed having the same woes?