Out of curiosity, have you looked at the new Native Boot from VHD features in Windows 7? Basically booting from VHD should give you at least 90% of native performance but with the possibility to make volatile configuration changes with a simple recovery model. Alternately it’s worth looking at XP mode if you do have any legacy driver issues. It’s basically a full version of XP that sits within Windows 7 and can pass apps back up to the parent. I’m sure you’d know best how these might be useful to you, but I thought I’d point it out in case you hadn’t seen it yet.

1. New Task Bar, it more or less mimicks mac osx, and it works well. Icons are consolodated properly for once and is clean.

2. Folder groups… or whatever its called… You can link all your folders into one group no matter where they are on your disk. So, if all your images are scattered into multiple locations, i.e. projects, photos, etc… they all get grouped into one dynamic folder. It makes accessing anything a snap, these kind of things make an os very powerful imo.