I fucking did it was tenish year ago. Ran it in a vbox for the fun of it. Oddly it was the best windows experience I ever had. Can't say how much malware was in it though.
I used pirated versions of XP for a decade. Nothing bad ever came of it. There were a lot of crackers back then that just did it for the challenge, and shared it because they wanted to.
My first copy of Winxp was stolen from windows a week before release, I found out when I saw a picture of someone holding a burnt disc with windows xp on it outside of Microsoft and it had my serial key on it.
That's awesome. I eventually got my hands on an enterprise CD key that was given out to over 1000 students at a university and used that instead of the keygens for tortented ISOs.