Well today I decided to install Windows XP with VMWare. Well I ran into a problem and its down right horrible if you can't find the problem. The issue apparently has something to do with Avast on the main OS. If you have hardware-assisted virtualization enabled it slows Windows XP to a crawl. Now for us to fix this we are going to disable it. Its not the safest thing to do but until Avast seems to fix this problem its the only way we will be able to run Windows XP fluently.
So first were going to open Avast from the taskmanager and click settings.
In this next window to troubleshooting uncheck "enable hardware-assisted virtualiztion" as seen in the photo
So the warning pretty much states that if you run a virtual os that any virus that it contains may leak into your main OS. Also in order to get this to work after unchecking you'll need to restart the computer.