King$nake, do some research on your subject before you post a topic....
High resolutions have been out for ages. Besides which, they wouldn't release 22" monitors if 90% (or whatever number of XP users) couldn't support the resolution.
Most modern games support widescreen, but not always in your preferred (native) resolution. There are patches about that you can download for many games, though, otherwise you can make it run with two black side bars.