Older 16 and 32 bit games

For the really old games you will be better off downloading a copy of virtual PC and running a Win 98 vm for them, inside Windows 7....

Dosbox will handle any nativly DOS games, but any 16-bit Windows program will not run under Vista or later, regardless of 32-64 bit status. Also, WinXP mode doesn't allow for graphics acceleration, so many other games that would otherwise be forced to work this way may be too slow to run in XP mode.

Best advice would be a seperate ME partition. Yes, ME stinks, but at least you can usually find drivers for it...