"it is the ant-piracy hardware validation checks that are the issue..."
What anti-piracy hardware ? The motherboard ?
Someone is actually making pirated motherboards ? How can windows xp tell if it's pirated or not ? What business is it of Microsoft to know what kind of motherboard someone is using ?

I originally had windows 98 and then added windows xp to make it dual boot
I don't see why xp would check the hatdware before the boot menu it doesn't make any sense That means that even if I remove xp I will still have the boot menu and xp will be checking the new motherboard even though it no longer exist as an OS

I will try to make that experiment this weekend
If windows 98 doesn't work then xp is worse than I thought and I probably wont use it too much