i've set up my laptop to do a "patchy" multiboot between xp, windows 7 and ubuntu (in that order). in theory, i thought this would work, as the windows 7 picked up the windows XP partition and then grub 2 should've replaced the windows7 longhorn bootloader. unhappy was i to learn that i now had a problem: instead of replacing the longhorn bootloader, grub2 just chain-loads it, so now i have 2 boot menus: 1x nice customizable grub2 and 1x bland longhorn. has anyone figured out/got knowledge as to how i can remove the longhorn loader and add it to my grub2 menu? any help would be greatly appreciated.

If memory serves correctly, I had the same problem and was unable to find a solution. I took the easy route though and just re-formatted.
Now I just run guest operating systems within a virtual box... much easier and I'm able to run Ubuntu in a window alongside Win 7.

i will hack away until i find a solution. if you install windows 7 first, you can have a perfectly fine dual boot. it's getting XP in there as well that's the problem. guess i'll have to keep trawling through forums and see if anyone else managed it successfully...

if you can dual boot ubuntu and win7 then in win7 environment you can run the XP mode which is basically a virtual machine.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

used it at work for testing win7 x64 with a xp x86 and it works just as fast

Sniperkid and BuddyChrist are both right!

I used to have a dual boot system with archlinux and win7. Then within win7 i had a virtualbox with xp. There isn't any performance issue running xp!

On the other hand i think you could try to erase from the boot.ini the xp option at msconfig on win7. That way i pressume win7 won't show its loader after grub since it will be the only os in boot.ini.

only thing i've tested with the virtual machine is AutoCAD (standard functions, nothing major) and there is no performance issues such as if you compare with a virtual machine (VMware etc) where there is quite a lag (obviously depending on hardware/qty machines etc).