>I am adopting your philosophy of installing a new OS clean. The problems I had under Vista seem to still exist under Win7.

It's been my experience that upgrade installs aren't always the greatest thing. Most of the time, any "quirkiness" from the older OS will generally get inherited -- or worse ends up getting magnified by more "quirkiness." Any "residue" of failed installs or uninstalls will end up haunting you as well.

As for headaches from upgrade -- I remember the headache from upgrading from Win 3.0 to Win 3.1. Took a total of 15 minutes and 4 hours. 15 minutes to finally get the install to complete w/o a problem (once I'd figured out what went wrong previously) -- after having spent 4 hours and having the upgrade crash 80% of the way through (with the end result of a mish-mash of old and new components that weren't compatible). Luckily I'd backed everything up *before* starting the upgrade, so all I needed to do is restore the affected parts and re-try the upgrade. I eventually figured out that I had to revert all the drivers back to the generic ones that came on the Windows discs -- then start the upgrade (i.e. Win 3.0 drivers for video card, mouse, etc were not compatible with Win 3.1).