  The aim of this work is to study the imprints that different models for black
hole (BH) and neutron star (NS) formation have on the Galactic distribution of
X-ray binaries (XRBs) which contain these objects. We find that the root mean
square of the height above the Galactic plane of BH- and NS-XRBs is a powerful
proxy to discriminate among different formation scenarios, and that binary
evolution following the BH/NS formation does not significantly affect the
Galactic distributions of the binaries. We find that a population model in
which at least some BHs receive a (relatively) high natal kick fits the
observed BH-XRBs best. For the NS case, we find that a high NK distribution,
consistent with the one derived from the measurement of pulsar proper motion,
is the most preferable. We also analyse the simple method we previously used to
estimate the minimal peculiar velocity of an individual BH-XRB at birth. We
find that this method may be less reliable in the bulge of the Galaxy for
certain models of the Galactic potential, but that our estimate is excellent
for most of the BH-XRBs.
