As a professional in this field, would like to say that if anyone does use XP anymore, it should be
only on computers that are
OFFLINE.
We do have a few nodes running XP but they are all
stand-alone. It's not advised to even connect them to the LAN if possible. We use them only for testing purposes.
My advice regarding the updates :
Its generally a bad idea to use updates meant for one version of the OS (Embedded here in this case) for a Desktop PC.
The Embedded Version fundamentally is a
HIGHLY stripped down version of the full OS and hence would obviously be lacking a
number of features that would be available in the full OS.
SO obviously, there would be
far fewer patches needed/released for the
embedded versions compared to the full versions and once should not rest with a false re-assurance that he has "patched" his OS
Thank you to @CyberCoder for the tip
Yet what Kerlingen says is right. Using the patches meant for Embedded on a desktop version of the OS would not be sufficient.