When was the last time you actually did a fresh install of XP? Just the other day I tried doing it on an early Vista-era laptop.
To start with, the XP (SP2 media - it was the only XP license I could find) installer couldn't recognize my SATA drive. Lacking a floppy drive, I had to go searching for ways to get the drive recognized. I was left with two options: Either rebuild my installation media & slipstream drivers onto it or go into BIOS and set my drive controller to a legacy emulation mode.
Once I got the base OS installed, almost none of my hardware was recognized. Neither my wired nor my wireless network controllers were recognized. Sound and video not recognized. There were about a half dozen other unrecognized devices that Windows couldn't even tell what type of device it was. Fortunately, being a laptop, I was able to go to the manufacturers site to locate and download all the drivers on another PC and bring them over on a USB stick. I, knowing that I would need to prepare myself, took the opportunity to grab Service Pack 3. These installed without a hitch.
Finally, having an installed system with the (mostly) recognized hardware & the latest service pack, I tried running Windows Update. You'd think that would work, right?
Nope.
The Windows update components installed on the system tried to connect to a service that no longer exists. All of the links it threw me to troubleshoot the problem 404ed. None of the troubleshooting docs on the MSFT website seemed to help. There were automated "FixIt" scripts that didn't do anything and tried linking me to a website that no longer existed. Somewhere along the way it was suggested I install the .NET framework - the download page barely functioned in my crufty old browser. Eventually I found a post in a forum with a link to an installer for an updated Windows update component which I gladly grabbed and installed.
After installing a functional WU client, I tried, again, to update my system. It spent a good 45 minutes searching for updates to my system. At the end, it returned a single required update - yet another version of the Windows Update client. Download, update & reboot.
The next time I ran Windows Update it, again, spun its wheels for 45 minutes. Finally, it came up with a list of over 150 updates that I would need to install, several of which were marked as needing to be handled individually. At this point, I'm well over 4 hours into the process.
If I'm having this sort of trouble installing and updating XP on hardware that could have originally been purchased with XP, just imagine how much trouble you'd have with something contemporary. This is why IT departments are moving away from XP; getting new systems up and running is already a nightmare. When everything goes EOL in less than a year it's just going to get worse. Even if I had known all the issues that would pop up & how to address them, I would still have been looking at 3 hours to get the base system installed before I even got around to installing any software.
In the end, I gave up on XP and just installed Fedora. It took all of about 15 minutes to install off a USB stick, recognized all my hardware & performs like a charm on this old (ca 2007) machine.