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O.o wuut?

why would you need to cheat steam like that?

You can use a VM (vitrual machine) and use Win 7 I believe. I'm not 100% sure it'll workor if there are othere reqiments for it since I never set one up myself since I've no need to.

Uninstal steam > uninstal xp
Instal win 7 > instal steam

You could run Windows 7 in a virtual machine provided you own it, but don't have it installed. And by running it in a virtual machine your games will run worse, because the virtual machine will take up a quite a bit of resources.

Maybe try to install Windows 7 on some VM like VirtualBox? But first it could be very riskfull, and it can end it by ban your account, second there will be no option to play any games, and third propably your PC could not handle with virtual win 7, if you still on windows XP.

Press mouse 2 on steam>Properties>Compatibility>Compatibility Mode(Check it)>WIN 7
http://gyazo.com/00c28c148517f5736867addf8ac61319.png

There is a reason it's win7+ , some library dependencies of big picture or stuff is at least for vista/win7 etc. so unless you have them you can't execute what you want to achieve.

Also I think it's time for you to upgrade, at least the OS.

why in the world do you still use windows xp?

To put this as simple as possible - no there isn't.
Windows Vista/7/8 work differently than XP. You are basically trying to cheat the OS to think it has a feature it doesn't have, so that it can tell to other programs it does.
You cannot emulate something you don't have (actually more than one feature on both, software and hardware level) and you cannot use a program for that since this feature would be a OS-specific low level feature.

Valve's John McCaskey has explained why there is no support for XP:

If you check http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey, you'll see XP is actually down to 12% of our surveyed users and dropping steadily. Further, we have data that of that 12% many are running on old hardware that won't support HDMI output for the living room or run Big Picture well anyway.

The technical reason for dropping XP is that XP is missing lots of modern Windows APIs and functionality that make developing rich UIs easier. Among these are Direct2D rendering support, D3D10+ (needed to combine 3D rendering and Direct2D together well), and DirectWrite font rendering.

We definitely wish we could include all XP users as well, but it's just not feasible right now and we didn't want to limit the quality of experience for users with newer OS's/hardware.

They could technically add support for XP but this would mean they would have to add the same feature twice, 1st for Vista/7/8 and 2nd for a 12 years OS.
Steam is already buggy as hell and I don't think adding features for 10% that still use XP is a good idea if this means making Steam more unstable.

use xbmc as a launcher for steam, of course you don't get so many big picture feature s, plus you have to add games manually, so prolly not worth it.

xp usage was like 10 % in last steam survey (and decreasing) so since it appears they have to code some things specially for xp, they decided to not support it

Yes, it's very simple... Install Windows 8

It would be easier to convince yourself that you are running Win XP while running Windows 7.

Why don't you just upgrade to Windows 7 and run everything in Windows XP Mode.

To put it simply, it's like trying to trick a pregnancy test into thinking you're a girl. Even if you could, you would still not have the organs to become pregnant, so it's pointless.

Huh?

Why would you want to do this?

whats the fuckin point of that o.O

they already release windows 8 and you still use win xp

Trust me, you don't need BigPicture. It's a lot heavier on resources.

Start WINE configuration. (ALT+F2 wine-config) Under the Applications tab, select the Default settings from the list. Now select the preferred Windows version from the dropdown menu underneath the list. Press OK.

Oh wait...

Or really, Shit Picture doesn't work in XP? Lucky you dodging this experience!

Big Picture isn't worth of trouble. Rather you want to play using TV and gamepad.

Install Linux then.