i tried not grinding my first playthrough, by the time i got to lunatic pandora it was major hell to get through
again you don't grind in xi...
the game's enemies are based on your average level, the higher your level the harder they are, you increase your stats via junctioning, the only "grinding" is spell gathering.
Vista; I did the PSX and holy ***problems.
32bit or 64bit?
it matters.
and esxpse is a great program and you should be having no issues if you're using a new version/ use decent plugins.
FF7 and FF8 pc do not like xp, vista, 7 each getting worse (well the last two may be the same).
definitely do not like x64 systems.
if you read that thread I linked you can figure out what you need to download to get it to work, it's a custom graphics driver, 7 is more complicated, but for 8 you shouldn't have issues short of maybe the disc drive issue (I solved by changing my discs drives, I used to solve it by changing the registry key for the game that has to do with the disc drive but it didn't work in 7x64) but you should be able to equally solve it by burning the cds to actual media if you don't feel comfortable changing drive letters.
to make it simple you download a good copy of the game.
you download the patch, apply it (read said thread) then download the custom graphics driver and apply it in the same manner as the patch. Now if your OS is as bitchy as mine when editing files in that folder open notepad as an administrator, then open the text file for the custom graphics driver (the ff8 part) and edit your resolution and anything else in there you want to fiddle with, within reason) and bam it should work.
Now if your install is *** up, that will take more trouble shooting.
First off let us/me know if you have a 32bit OS or 64bit