To report back, everything does work but the problem is my setup. My monitor is an Ultrawide 2560x1080 and over HDMI and depending on the video card, it might not work well. Some video cards with HDMI out drive it fine and some like an AGP 6800GT using DVI to HDMI worked fine. In this setup, the DVI to HDMI has issues. I think I'll get a late XP/early Win7 Radeon HD card with HDMI, somewhere in the 6670-7770. This machine is going to be a overpowered Steam/GOG Win XP machine. I think I'll put it in my signature. I always wanted a 7770 when it came out but it was not affordable and by the time I was ready, I got the R9 390 which I sold in time to get the full value back, plus a little more for the RX 480.
So, the fix: I switched to a higher quality DVI to HDMI and it would start to show glimpses of the desktop in 5-10 second bursts. It was trying to squeeze 2560x1080 in to 1920x1080 and in that physical real-estate, meaning it didn't strech the whole screen. Text was completely unreadable but goog to the point of finding the display properties and choosing 1920x1080 or below and that worked fine.
Thanks!
Steamer/GOG-er: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula | AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.7GHz all cores | Mushkin 8GB DDR3 RAM 1333 w/ 6-6-6-18 1T | Dual AMD Radeon HD 6850s in CrossFireX | X-Fi Titanium | Dual-boot Windows XP and Vista