I had a half hour to kill before a brass group rehearsal last evening, so I decided to install the MS updates on several of my computers. Unfortunately that included my old Win2K Athlon machine that hosted my weather website and also ran all of my weather-related programs including VWS, WD, Weatherlink, VirtualVP, Startwatch, VPLive, ImageSalsa, MovieSalsa, along with Cerebus FTP Server so my webcam pics can get pushed into the /wamp/www directory. Rebooting after the upgrade gave a blue screen of death and a nonspecific 0x0000001E error message. Nothing I did would revive the old beast including a complete restore from a weekold full Acronis backup. Tried replacing the memory and pulling PCI cards, and used the original Win2K CD-ROM in order to recover, all to no avail.
I suspected this old machine was on its way out last summer when I built an Athlon II x64 dual core with 4 GB of RAM and 650 GB HD and a Motherboard with a serial port on which I had installed the release candidate Win7. Windows 7 RTM x64 took until about 5 this AM to to a fresh install with all of my 'shortcuts' that wasted lots of time.
I can confirm that VirtualVP doesn't function in Win7 x64 and that the Virtual PC function of Win 7 doesn't allow it to run either. Virtual PC is set up with a default XP Pro 32 bit image that runs within Win7, and I thought I might be able to get that to work. VWS didn't see Com1, and Wamp's Apache couldn't access port 80, despite firewall settings to the contrary.
So I currently am limping along with my Win7 x64 installation that almost works well enough to keep. For some reason my VWS jpeg's aren't being written at all, but it's good enough after 22 straight hours of fiddling, diddling, and cursing quite liberally at times. After a good night's sleep, I think I'll install Win7 32 bit and just forego the extra GB of RAM that won't be used by that version. I was able to mount my Acronis backup image on my Win7 install (via Acronis, of course) so I could recover all of my data files and installation parameters. I wouldn't want to have to try to recreate a lot of that stuff like the ImageSalsa data.
Backups are worth their weight in gold!