My windows 7 nightmare

My windows 7 family pack finally arrived yesterday, and I jumped right in for the 64bit OS. I installed fresh (want a clean fast system), but accidentally erased the wrong HDD, which has all my HF200 videos made for the past 6 month. So nothing survived except the ones I uploaded to youtube.

Then I found it can't recognize my EOS digital rebel XT. After a bunch of tries I decided to boot back to XP, only to find it is not booting any more. So I have to install XP again, and in my horror, found that one of my big partitions became unallocated. Boot back to windows 7, the partition is still unallocated. That partition contains all my personal development data, all check in to CVS but will be a headache to restore. Then I found a XP tool released by MS that can help restore partitions. I assigned the unallocated partition to a drive, boot back to XP, only to find the entire partition is now a big drive.

So I decided to install windows 7 32bit, to try my luck with my camera. It is recognized after I install the driver for vista, but can't pull pictures. Went online and found there is a PTP mode for the camera, which I always thought it is for printers only (because it has a 'printer' next to the option).

At this point I decided to install win7 on my 400G HD because both partition is gone now. win 7 can't find the drive. Tried various methods, finally found out I have to reformat it under windows again to let it show up.

After a lot of trial and error (windows 7, xp install/re-install, apply patches, download all my apps etc), I finally got everything working. Only problem is Starcraft is not displaying right under windows 7, so I will have to re-install XP again till Starcraft II is out.

Final thoughts.
Windows 7 pros:
1. Convenient Security (run apps as normal user and you don't need to use a different account). This is the primary reason I updated.
2. looks pretty.

Cons:
1. Starcraft looks bad.
2. File explorer only show full path after you click on it.
3. Network icon does not flash when there are network activity (XP does).
4. EOS Rebel XT can only show as a drive, can't auto download pictures any more (not much a con, since I don't want extra drivers)
5. A lot of services, I think many are not needed. Takes time to find which ones are bad and disable them.
6. It could be either XP or Windows 7. Sometimes it make your partitions unallocated.