[PLUG] Stable guest for Virtualbox - Win 7 or 8?

[Keith Lofstrom]

Windows 7 or 8 for a long term virtual guest?  Which is more
Virtualbox compatible and less dancing-paperclip disgusting?

My wife uses Linux, like me, but both of our accountants use
Quickbooks for our businesses.  I sometimes run two Windoze-
only CAD tools, and she will try Dragon speech recognition.
I sometimes test websites with Exploder and PDFs with Adobe
Reader.  Other than that, Linux does everything we want. 

Running some flavor of Windoze as a virtual guest is necessary,
but we do NOT want to bother with all the "features" of the OS.
Nor do we want to upgrade the OS for at least a decade.  Our
distro is 64 bit Scientific Linux 7 (like CentOS 7 and RHEL 7,
a stable version of Fedora 20, vaguely like Ubuntu 14.04),
with Mate desktop added, with long term support until 2027.

I presume we will need to upgrade Quickbooks at least once to
stay on the accountant treadmill, but we do NOT want to connect
Windoze to the world for upgrades (or use Quickbooks online).

The version of Quickbooks we are using now requires at least
XP, and I imagine Intuit will stop supporting old distros for
the newest versions.  Which our accountants will buy to make
data files incompatible with older versions.  Don't you just
LOVE the forced-upgrade deathmarch of proprietary software,
and the reflexive upgrade mania of its consumers?  Please 
upgrade to Electricity 2.0 and replace all your appliances :-(

The host machines are 64 bit laptops and three servers. 
We will sometimes connect to the virtual machines over
high bandwidth OpenVPN tunnels.

So - to run only occasionally as a Virtualbox guest, which
version of Windoze?  What should we be watching out for?
We must dance with the devil, but in a very limited way.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com