I only played with qemu under OpenBSD, not under XP, so I am not sure if the following applies to qemu under XP
Have you created a image file for qemu to work with?
Code:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 MyQemu.disk 2G
Invoke qemu with the "-m 512" option to specify 512 MB of RAM for qemu to use:
Code:
qemu -m 512 -boot d -cdrom <your.livecd.iso> -monitor stdio -L <BIOS and keymaps> MyQemu.disk
Most LiveCD's I played with needed at least 512MB memory.