Fresh install of Sonar 4 Pro in XP

Greetings all,
I have an old PC which at one time, with XP Pro SP2  ran Sonar 4 Pro like a charm:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 
Socket 939
Chipset: NVIDIA nForce3 250
Mem: DDR 2048 MBytes
Video: ATI Radeon 9550/x1050 Series
Audio Interface: PreSonus Firepod

Directx 9.0c

Upon recently updating to SP3, my firewire is now dead.
Tried numerous forum ideas, driver updates, tried MicroSoft patch for that SP3 issue
the MS patch hung up in download because 
"Windows Validation" wanted to run. I did that.
--and the download failed over and over again.
Funny, I never had to validate any Windows Update activity--ever. 
(could it be that Microsoft doesn't really want to support XP anymore, and gave the issue a dead-end answer?)

jeeesh.

My question: Is any body out there successfully running XP SP3 on Sonar 4 (or similar)?

Opa


UPDATE: 
Beagle, good advice, and is confirmation of my next step; I went ahead and wiped the hard drive, did fresh windows install of XP (no SPs yet). installed Sonar, Presonus audio driver, and then messed with device manager till sound worked thru firewire. Sucks only a little cause now I have to get synths, kantos (vst stuff) talking again. small potatoes compared to "no sound."
Next step--will set Restore point and get the machine gradually up to SP2.
Opa

UPDATE Part 2:
I just discovered that as of July 2010, Microsoft ceased support of XP.
OK, fine; so I just buy Windows 7 and run Sonar 4 (and any other old software) in XP mode, right?
Wrong. My old machine does have the specs to run Windows 7.
The bottom line is, either I try to run XP with no Service Packs, and see what happens.
Or, I come up with enough jack to to buy all new PC with Win 7. 
Isn't computing fun?
Opa