Installed kvm on the laptop.  Was a bit annoyed to discover I had to reboot (to alter the BIOS in order to enable the virtualization support in the processors), but other than that was extremely easy to install (just aptitude install kvm (I already had QEMU)).

Compared to vanilla QEMU on the same box the Win2K environment just flies!  Other than performance it seems to be pretty much the same, though for some reason my networking didn't work on my Win2K image.  I wouldn't be surprised if I need to set up something on the host to make it work properly.

More as I pound on it more.