VM Player within a virtual instance of Win 7 Premium

Hi have a virtual instance of Win 7 Home Premium running on my Mac using Parallels.
Spotted too late that only Win 7 Pro runs XP Mode
Also that my scanner won't work with Win 7 (HP 5470c) so looked for solutions.
No fresh drivers so only way is to run it in a virtual XP environment.
In any case I have other software which might or might not run under Win 7
Even tried to upgrade to Win 7 Pro but online upgrade isn't available any more...
Have XP Pro disk so can create XP machine.
Installed VM Player but instance.vmx file needs editing.
That file isn't created until the VM is created.
OK that's straightforward I create a VM without the O/S, then I log out and edit the vmx file.
But when I restart the (as yet uninstalled XP machine) all I get is a black screen and no sign of any action.
I downloaded VM Player 6.0.1 which in fact doesn't seem to have as many Menu options as the example shown on the "How to" Geek site that I was using as a reference.
Anyone have any experience?
I tried Virtual PC from Microsoft - that didn't cooperate
I also have used Virtual Box from Oracle but that didn't operate very well either.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions, leads...

Hi there
is your host machine a mac or a pc running windows. If it's a mac you are going to run into problems running a second level vm running a different virtual software package - running a virtual xp under a virtual w7 so performance will be horrible. Now I don't know how parallels will handle a second level vm but vmplayer will do it just fine albeit with lousy performance for the second leven vm-- but the first level vm must itself be using VMware software too.

cheers
jimbo

Hi & thanks - actually I've read some of your other posts.
Host is Mac running 10.6.8 - works well, don't see point of upgrading...
Parallels has been working perfectly with XPPro for about 4 years
Actually Win 7 loads up perfectly with Parallels - no problems there.
It's because of the scanner driver mainly that I have been trying to load a VM into Win7
As I said I got into a loop because the vmx file has to be edited but you can't edit it before you create the VM and then after editing the VM loads but just to a black screen (instead of a Blue Screen of death).