I'm thinking of migrating a Desktop machine (Windows XP) to a VM solution (VirtualBox or MS Virtual PC). The reason is that I need a new hardware anyways and I don't want to (cannot properly) reinstall all the "business" apps on there.

So my plan goes as follows: I'll pull an image of the machine and restore it to a Virtual Machine using Acronis Universal Restore or some other tool that can restore to dissimilar hardware. (The process is largely irrelevant for this question I think.)

Once I have this virtual machine properly running I'll move it to a new PC.

So the question now is. Are there any caveats wrt. to Windows (XP?) being installed in a VM and the VM machine being moved around on different host computers? Can anything break in the OS inside the VM? Will there be troubles wrt. to Windows activation?