This is analogous to installing DOS just to play doom...
GTA2, as you said- works fine in XP, and so Does Porsche Unleashed (Porsche 2000).
Really it's more a matter of finding the proper patches, both official and unofficial. Almost any game with a solid following has unofficial patches for new Operating Systems; why, even NFS: High Stakes has a patch that let's it run on Vista when in fact it barely runs properly on XP without changes...