Thanks for all the input!
I certainly am not laughing at your suggestion of Win XP. It's built like a tank, and I still use it for personal purposes. However, as you mentioned, I'm not so confident in the security of XP. If it's behind a hardware firewall I don't worry about it, but opening it up to the WWW.... I don't know--is that safe? Vista is pain, but I've tried 7. It works, but it's a heavy OS. I do have the option to change the OS, though, so I could try something else. I do want to stick with Windows for this server. though.
I did think about running in a virtual layer. I hadn't heard of Steadier State (a spin-off of Windows Steady State, I suppose) but I was considering Toolwiz TimeFreeze or some other such software. The problem with that strategy is that I'm basically allowing the PC to be hacked and trashed, then I just restore it. I might lake that as a fall-back, but I'd like some good up-front security too.
Thanks for testing, bmartino1! I am currently using the save edition, 2008 R2 standard. I could upgrade to Data Center, but didn't think I needed to. Besides, this is on old server PC. I don't want to give it such a heavy OS that it can't do anything else. Do let me know if you notice anything!