Desktop virtualization and Windows 7

A colleague of mine purchased a Windows 7 based notebook computer and found that some long-cherished applications (I believe he mentioned Lotus Agenda among others) wouldn't work in a Windows 7 environment. So, he asked me what would the best virtual machine software environment to support Windows XP applications such as his favorites.

As we discussed his options, more details emerged including the fact that his machine didn't come with one of the overwhelming list of Windows 7 options that included Microsoft's virtual machine software. I suspect that his system, being a rather low-end offering, is likely not to have an X86 processor that supported the necessary Intel Virtualization technology anyway.

We discussed offerings from VMware, Parallels and even Sun's Virtualbox.

What would you suggest for a non-technical business consultant?