>Hogwash Win 8 is not that difficult to use. It's also more secure than Win7. Go with Win8 Pro. It supports Hyper-V for virtual machines. And always 64 bit now.
>

I agree with the security issue.

As for Hyper-V, I went back to VMware. A few years ago I really liked VirtualBox and used it solid for almost a year - and then had some major stability problems with upgrades, and abandoned it.

I gave VMware and Hyper-V a good side-by-side test last year - performance was about the same, but VMware definitely wins out on functionality.