Office 2003 on spinning rust launches and completes tasks faster than modern Office on brand new machines with NVME drives.

On that 733mhz machine with Office 2003, Excel will be open within a few seconds if I double click on it--if you move up to a 1ghz+ machine it opens up so fast it might as well be instant.

How modern can you go with XP? Would you have to do weird adapters/emulators to get a full install working?

Someone up thread mentioned that there's a WinXP image available that has a ton of back ported drivers and things baked in for NVME support and modern chipsets. So...pretty darn modern I think!

That's also my experience.

I certainly wouldn't, the ribbon has much better discoverability than tiny toolbars. And Office 2003 performed reasonably well with HDDs anyway.