| I found XP to be more robust than 7even or Vista

I've found that, too. Vista/7 is a brittle system, and
with so many restrictions it's not easy to fix things
that go wrong. I was trying to install IE11 recently
on Win7-64 or on a Win7-32 laptop. I couldn't get it
to work on either one! Microsoft's own browser, which
hardly runs anywhere to begin with. Only Win7/8/10
are supported. Yet it wouldn't install.

Win7-32 needed SP1, but that wouldn't install because,
it said, there were problematic customizations. ???
It's an extra laptop that's hardly ever used.

On Win7-64 IE11 kept saying it needed to download
patches first. It was ridiculous that it should *require*
post SP1 patches that are not in the installer. As it
turned out, those patches either weren't relevant or
were already installed. That didn't satisfy IE11. By the
time I was through, Win7 was unstable and a warning on
the Desktop was telling me that it was not "genuine".
(It's a Dell. Windows should have been able to see that.)
I finally ended up reinstalling from a disk image. The sheer
incompetence displayed with that IE11 fiasco is
jaw-dropping. IE10 was similar. I've never managed to
update beyond IE9 on that computer. Not that I care
a great deal. I only want it for testing webpages. But
it's inexcusable that they can't even make their own
browser software install on their own product without
problems.