Hi!

It's getting really bad in some cases: for example a lot of $899 HP
printers that are just a year or three old do not have ANY print
drivers available from HP for the latest 64-bit XP.

Now that is truly odd. I've found that HP has usually done a good job of
providing updated drivers for many older products. In my case, they had
updated the Mac OS X drivers to be "Universal" (Intel & PowerPC) software
for a DeskJet 5800 series printer. On the PC side of things, I was impressed
to note that XP/2000 drivers were available for my OfficeJet 500 series
machine.

As far as I'm aware, the 64 bit editions of Windows XP have not been hugely
popular, have a pile of limitations on what current software can run on
them, and much hardware doesn't appear to be supported.

William