XP Pro: Different processes over four cores, or exact same process?

I've been running myself ragged trying to find this answer even before I bought the Q6600. People on message boards keep talking about whether or not

Say that I'm running four ORDINARY, NON-THREADED programs on Windows XP Pro. What happens?

1. Each process gets one core and runs simultaneously (what I'm hoping for)
2. All processes share one core and have to deal with regular time-slicing (which would be really sad and seems unlikely according to Performance in task manager)
3. *Each core runs the same process and deals with regular time-slicing (which would be really sad AND a waste of processor power)

*I already know that XP doesn't magically split the program into different threads if the program hasn't been written to be multi-threaded, and I know that some games are written to recognize and take advantage of multiple cores. What I mean by the same process is that each core runs the exact same bit stream across all four cores - which would be just like using only one core.

Hopefully I don't hear an overwhelming bias to 2 and 3, since that would mean that I actually have a slower processor than I had before I upgraded. I know Linux can be made to evenly distribute programs across four cores, but does any Windows OS do this? Am I already doing it and not knowing?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

there was a dual core patch for windows XP that *may* be what your looking for, to my knowledge windows runs as much stuff on core 0 as possible then moves over to core 1 and so on, but i havnt done any testing.

using task manager however you can set different programs to run on a different affinity (read: set different programs to run on different cores). i can guarantee that the Q6600 is not slower than your last CPU unless of course you last cpu was a faster quad.