Yes, I did partition my drives correctly. In fact I did pretty much everything right except enough research. I discovered that this is a somewhat common problem though I could not find any good explanation. This is how I fixed it, albeit admittedly a shot in the dark.
I installed EasyBCD, a "by donation" utility by NeoSmart Technologies. It had an option that would force XP to work again, and I chose this option. It seems to have deleted the hidden files ntldr, bootmgr and boot.ini (not sure of these names). It worked. XP loaded, but I could not load 7. I then reinstalled 7 from the installation disk and voila, everything worked. In fact it added an entry to install Windows. I went back to BCDEdit and made a few changes such as descriptions, display orders and timeouts and I am now in business.
Good luck to anyone reading this post with a similar problem.