Quote -
Why would I want to spent any money on W7 at all?

Because it's smooth and slick, and faster than XP, for one.
But also because it represents the future of Windoze operating sytems, and in (I think) 2 years MS will drop support for XP.
But before that happens, many other software manufacturers will drop support for XP. Adobe, for one, already has removed XP from its list of supporting operating systems for their CS 4 line.

Not saying that there's anything wrong with sticking with XP for now, but Windows 7 is really a huge improvement over XP in so many ways.

However, if you're using mostly older and 32 bit programs, there probably really isn't much actual reason to.