So I decided last night to turn my Athlon64X2 4000 workstation into a server.
I installed a fresh copy OpenSuSE 10.3, with minimal packages. Everything installed and running is using 55Megs or ram.
I installed XEN, and the system is now using 96megs.

I installed XP, and that runs just fine. However it seems that I cannot assign hardware to it for exclusive use just yet. Apparently that feature isn;t available in XEN 3.1
EDIT: Actually, hardware passthrough isn’t possible in a fully virtualized environment. In a Paravirtualized environment, it is, but requires a custom kernel.
Bummer. So much for the easy way out, of installing beyondtv, and being done with it…
: (