Windows 10 dual boot with XP - problems.

Hi all,
I had Windows XP on my hard drive for a long time, created a separate partition and
installed Windows 10. (both 32 bit).

Windows 10 is working fine, it set up the dual boot menu where I can also select
Windows XP ("earlier version of Windows").
Problem is, in XP, I've been getting some strange crashes in programs I've run for years. For example,
Firefox, avast anti-virus and Tmpgenc mpeg encoder. A thing in common based on the diagnostics I've been
able to gather, is program exception illegal operation.

I've been scratching my head, when I got the idea to temporarily restore XP's boot loader and boot it directly.
Once I did, all the problems stopped and it was working normally again. Later ran Windows 10 RE and did the "startup
repair" to re-implement the Windows 10 dual boot menu, and sure enough, the problems in XP resumed.

Does anybody have any thoughts or theories as to what may be happening?
Any idea's appreciated

Thanks -
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telepro21 said:

Hello davexnet,

From your description, it does sound like the different Windows boot loaders are affecting the operation of your dual-boot system.
Have you considered the use of a stand-alone 3rd-party boot-loader?
Perhaps this approach would permit Windows XP and Windows 10 to operate properly. The chart here offers some idea as to what is available--> Comparison of boot loaders - Wikipedia

Thanks for responding, I will study that list and see if one of them may work. Regarding the error I saw "illegal operation".
In my mind that either means some corruption in memory occurred and the processor tried to execute some garbage,
or it was a real instruction but it was not supported on the processor or OS.

I posted a similar question at the forum of the EasyBCD product (those guys know a lot about dual booting)
and I got one response from a guy who thought the problem was "very interesting" and he suggested the options
PAE or NX may be involved. I did some testing but I couldn't resolve it.