fedora 9 / windows XP grub question

[Mike Zingale]

I just did a clean install of Fedora 9 on my laptop.  I had the
install use any Linux partitions.  Usually I would tell it to put grub
on the boot partition install of on the MBR, but I was not presented
that option with Fedora 9.

However, it seems to have just magically worked -- my Windows XP boots
if I select "other" from the grub menu.  I used to think that grub
overwrote the Windows MBR and that this could not work.  Is this a
recent change with grub or somehow just an anomaly?

Thanks,

Mike