The way things are going I'm going to have to keep a WinXP IE6 VM for managing all these switches, printers, UPSs, and everything else with an embedded management platform.
But yes, VM sounds like a better solution. Why risk the security of your desktop/laptop with unmaintained legacy applications?
This is exactly what we ended up doing. Our building HVAC controller is managed by an applet that doesn't work under the latest few Java versions, and we have another appliance that requires SSL but can't speak TLS, so current browsers can't even reach it.
While we're already working on replacing the appliance, there's no realistic way we're going to replace the HVAC controller any time soon...
It's going to be really hard on a lot of things when NPAPI vanishes entirely.