Great post Evan! I take many, if not all of these steps when redoing windows, whether it be a laptop, a desktop or a windows mobile phone. Evernote is your friend for all of these lists, especially if you use the checkbox shortcut (ctrl+shift+c).

I have been using the Windows 7 RC for a while now and have found it to be pretty comprehensive with its compatibility. I use the 64bit version on my laptop (upgraded from Vista) and the 32bit version on my wife's laptop, which was a clean install from XP. My wife loves it and it runs great even though the computer is only running the bare minimum of RAM (1GB).

With the Vista upgrade, I barely had to do anything. I did run into a few compatibility issues, though most were solved by updating drivers or by running the program or install in compatibility for Vista or XP and, as an added push, in administrator mode. Easy to do with a simple right-click and selection of properties. Whatever didn't work was unimportant to me, as I can not remember what they might have been.

With the XP clean install, the key was to do a full image backup first, just in case it all went south. I used Acronis True Image for this. Then, a really helpful tool for getting user account settings and files transferred to the new installation is to use the Windows Easy Transfer Tool. It's a quick download from Microsoft for the XP version I was running and a native program with both Vista and Windows 7. It made a lot of the settings transfers (especially for user accounts) fairly hands off, though you will want to do some tweaking in the new install of course. It may also help with the files and settings issues you mentioned with certain programs like Adobe Premiere.

All in all, I think that this will be helpful to many people. I expect Windows 7 to take off pretty well — it runs better on XP systems than XP does. For me at least.