How isolated is the Host?

Hi All,

Just had to do a full reinstall of win8 after a nasty virus that proved too hard to clean off. No idea where it came from but I would like to use Player to isolate the Host from future similar disasters. My 16 and 17 year old grand-kids use the PC when they come over of a weekend, so there ain't no telling where the nasty came from. :).

I have a Player set up for XP from a past PC that has long since gone to the bone yard. What I am thinking is to use the Player with XP for all web surfing. If I should get another infection to the XP-Guest, how safe will the Host system be?

I can keep a copy of the bare XP Player and if it gets infected then I can copy the clean version back for the Player to use. So, just how insulated would the Host be?

I ask, as I see two VMWare player network items in the "Shared Networks" list of win8.

Thanks