xp-mce tweaks without breaking anything?

[romeoagogo]

I am running an XP-MCE virtual machine inside ubuntu specifically for encoding avi to wmv and streaming to my xbox 360. I want to streamline the VM as much as possible to save som RAM for the host OS but I am really afraid that following any of the common guides is going to break my media connectivity since I have had so much damn trouble with it in the past. I was just looking for a good general guide on reducing the memory footprint of this install. Also I was wondering how much RAM you think I should I assign to the VM to allow it the fastest encoding possible. The machine has 784mb in total but I also have Torrentflux/Apache/SSH/samba running on the host OS.

Thanks