The GIMP or a GIMP. That is an imporant distinction.
XP can boot and install from the CD, I did it no problem. The dual booting support was amazingly simple, but then I did have a new hard drive to put XP on. Unless your short of space or want to do clever rights access stuff I wouldn't put NTFS on, even then the space saving appears to be pretty small in the scheme of things. The disadvantage of NTFS is that almost nothing can read an NTFS drive without pissing around.
Finally you may want to run the file and transfer wizard before nuking ME. It does roughly what it says on the tin and is good at getting my documents, start menu, IE favourties etc. On the other hand as you'll need to re-install most software and may not use IE it could be a total waste of time.
Just my 1.4 trillion Turkish Lira.
