Audacity 2.1.3 is the latest version officially supported for Windows XP.
I’m using XP (for personal reasons) and have Audacity 2.2.2. installed and working.
If there is any information about how this version (2.2.2) is actually able to run on XP and what the risks of using unsupported version of Audacity are in this particular case, please tell here.
Yes. That was the release when we officially stopped supporting XP. That was the final version that was tested on XP prior to release.
We didn’t do anything to deliberately prevent later versions of Audacity from running on XP, so slightly later versions of Audacity will run on a fully updated XP SP3 provided that the processor supports SSE2.
I’ve used Audacity 2.2.2 on XP without any major problems. I no longer have an XP machine and I don’t recall if there were any XP specific issues.
The main “risk” comes from using an obsolete operating system. It is very highly recommended to not go on-line with an XP machine as there have been no security fixes for years. Hackers and virus makers are known to have continued targetting XP for several years after Microsoft stopped fixing it.
The “risk” of using Audacity on XP is that if you have problems, you are on your own.