Made some progress on this.
Got WinXP and all the internet software I use installed and configured on a VMWare setup.
My only problem was Firewall/AntiVirus software, I was using AVG AntiVirus and Norton personal firewall (NPF), and as NPF was not XP compatible I had to look for alternatives. I liked NPF because I could easily configure the permissions.
Looked first at AVG AntiVirus and AVG Internet security but AVG have gone the "Dumb It Down" route, so that counted them out, bad move as I was going to pay a subscription for this.
What I relay wanted was all the features I had with my previous setup and it looks like I've found it in Commodo Internet Security, which combines both AntiVirus and Firewall. The Firewall has the same kind of configurable permissions as NPF and it doesn't have a "Dumb It Down" interface. Not to mention that this is completely free. So I'm going to give that a try and see if I like it in actual use. If I do I'll pay a subscription to support it. I live in hope that one day commercial software like this will be available for FreeBSD, don't want some GPL'ed thing.
As for the harddrive I've found one I can use in my spares box (forgot I had it). Just need to wipe the drive before I can use it, which takes about 24 hours. Once that's done I only need to create a fully merged clone of my VMWare XP setup and then image the clone drives and lastly write those image files to the real hard drive.
Then it's Installing Commodo and doing some final configuration before I'm fully NetFunctional again.
Since I was doing a system setup I decided to do some housekeeping and cleared out about 150Gb of redundant files and backups. Created new images of my main computer setup, just in case that goes (Paranoid eh!). The good thing is to restore those images takes about 30mins work and I'm running again.
And no I didn't have a recent image of my internet system, the amount of work to update the old image is about equal to doing the new XP setup, the old setup was Win2k so wasn't worth it.
I've just finished a backup of all my project files etc, and am in the process of doing the proverbial chkdsk and defragment of all my drives. Getting all clean and tidy.
Anyway this should all be behind me in a few of days.
Still using the GF's laptop, I hate laptop keyboards, feels like I'm using a 1960's typewriter.