VM on Fedora 16 for Lego Mindstorms

Tried various things, and searched the web.

Did not find any success on running the GUI software that came with the Lego NXT under Wine, and having it connect to the NXT to download programs.

the python works great, as does my Android phone;  but the LEGO gui software

So:

Installed the default Virtualization on Fedora 16.
Then installed an old version of Windows XP

found I could install and run the lego GUI, and it could see the USB device !

On Fedora's Virtual Machine Manager GUI, I just added the usb device corresponding to the NXT brick,
and the XP vm found it.

Notes:

initial hard disk for XP is a bit small; need to investigate: can I make it larger or do I need to re-install?
my first install/setup was with all defaults, and the GUI seems to lag a bit, not as snappy as I'd like;