After reading that Sun VirtualBox 3 includes 3d hardware acceleration (experimental) I immediately set it up to give OP a try in an XP guest on a Vista host. So far I am unable to get OP to run at all (but discovered something interesting about the quicksilver debug window.. I'll keep you posted marstone).
Anyway, overall this is the best performance from a virtualisation solution that I have seen. I may end up eating some crow as I assume VirtualBox is at least partially java based. ... Well now, I just looked it over and it appears to be all C/C++ and a python scripting interface. No java.
The dxdiag (directx 9c - XP SP3) Direct3D test fails on the directx 7 interfaces, but runs the directx 8 and 9 3D interfaces faster than I have ever seen. The trick to the experimental 3D hardware acceleration support is it needs the custom install option on setup, then once you have a VM setup install the guest additions on the XP VM in safe mode (and again after windows was fully updated).
It looks promising but still has a way to go. It is free and I believe the 3d stuff is OSS as well.
I'm going to give a few more tries at getting OP running on it but if not, I will be keeping my eye on this one.