Windows 7: The Curates Egg?

I finally made the switch to Windows 7 at the weekend.  Vista, which promised so much in the beginning, was slowly getting slower with many more episodes of the dreaded spinning wheel for no apparent reason, so I decided to take the plunge.  Having done my due diligence and read the feeds on W7 and pondered their meaning I decided to go.  I went for the Upgrade which came with both 64 bit and 32 bit disks.  Therein was the first puzzle.  Having checked my processor and discovered it would run 64 bit applications I looked forward eagerly to a new world only to have my expectations dashed when I discovered that you can only upgrade 32 bit Vista Home Premium to 32 bit Windows 7 Home premium.  Never mind I won't notice the difference thought I.
Knowing that preparation, belts and braces and spot welds are required for any change in an MS product, I took an image of my hard disk, backed it up with Windows back up and copied all my files across to my 1TB external hard drive so if all turned to shit I could rebuild the OS in Vista using the computer's recovery disk.
I also followed the advice of Windows Upgrade Adviser and uninstalled  iTunes and printed off hard copies of MS's upgrade instructions.
So when the software arrived I reckoned I was ready to go and eager to do so.  I inserted the disks and opted for "Upgrade" rather than "Custom Install" [I won't bore you with the technical reasons for going down this path].  Following MS's lead I chose to download any updates required before continuing.  Imagine my horror when I got a message something like "Cannot continue with Installation.  File 45cn90fhk.hgu [or something quite like it] cannot load!!!.  So after several retries that yielded the same thing and much puzzling I elected to proceed without downloading updates, assiduously ignoring MS's warning that if I did it may cause my entire computer to melt.  Success....installation started and then told me I had to uninstall my phone software which I could only do by aborting the installation.
Having done this and gone through the whole palava again it started to churn and it churned and churned and churned for about 5 hours, restarting many times, before I had my new operating system.
But then then the real hard-to-solve problems started.
My scanner wouldn't work and after much cogitation I found a site with a Windows 7 download for the scanner, an Epson V300 (not on Epson's UK site I might add).  I installed the W7 driver and it still wouldn't run so I tried running it in compatibility mode (W7's compatibility mode is much better than Vista's and really works well).  This worked but means that each time I run the scanner I have to tell the dialogue box that it's really OK to do this.
Nero 7 didn't work and Nero would not provide an update, instead saying you could upgrade to Nero 9 (Windows 7 Certified) for only £39.99.  Bugger that I thought: I don't really need it so I uninstalled it (more of this later).
Everything now seemed OK so I sat back to enjoy the Windows 7 experience.  And it was very good.  Quicker (except perversely Windows Media Centre  which was incredibly slow-again more in a minute), more intuitive and better looking.  In short the OS that Vista should have been.
Then I discovered that both my optical drives weren't being picked up by the OS.  Device Manager told me that their drivers had been corrupted and the registry entries were shot.  How did that happen but more importantly how to fix it?
Using the most useful and best piece of software MS has ever made, System Restore, four times I concluded that uninstalling Nero had somehow corrupted the Registry.  So I rolled it all back two days and recovered my two optical drives.  It had been, as the Great Duke once said, a damn close run thing.  Now it's functioning OK and like the Curate's Egg some of it is very good.  Except I have an un-uninstallable, completely useless piece of software which regularly sends messages about being unable to load.
The bad bits are that it runs slow with some software: Windows Media Centre and FeedDemon particularly, with no apparent fixes.  And Windows Media Centre although obviously a new and slicker version still has real problems with its interface - it is still a major and puzzling chore to get the media libraries set up properly.
Was it all worth it?  Yes is the answer.  It continues to get faster over time, rather like a child learining how to ride a bike, most applications run better and the interface is great.
If you are going to upgrade from Vista think carefully about whether you can bear the nausea of doing a clean install and then having to reinstall all your software and settings.  It's probably a better way to go than upgrading.  If you are running XP you have to do this anyway -there is no migration path.