Yesterday was a fun day, well, okay, I did have a LITTLE fun blowing away my previous install of Windows 7 Ultimate RC.  It was OMG I CAN’T TAKE THIS PROBLEM ANYMORE *shoots windows* sorta situation.  I was trying to open my Office Live Workspace in any Office 2007 applications appropriate and for the life of me I could not.  I would consistently get a Windows Security dialog prompting for credentials.  I cleared my cookies, deleted my cache and nothing would let me see that pretty little dialog.

So that combined with the fact IE8 kept losing my cookies (argh!), I felt it was time to move away from my so far stable RC experience.  I’m not entirely certain that the IE8 issue wasn’t tied to Google Chrome 4.0 which I had installed prior to things going wacky (I really need to find out how much Chrome integrates itself with IE’s files).

So I blew away Windows and installed my technical beta tester RTM copy of 7 Ultimate.  I ran into a few problems along the way, but solutions too.  I had a fairly major problem with Office 2007 refusing to install, instead giving me an Error 1923 (I think).  It turned out to be tied to the fact I hadn’t restarted since attempting to install the update for Windows Virtual PC RC.  So don’t be lazy and try and install it before restarting (I had a download going at the same time, otherwise I’d have followed that best practice, lol).

Office Live Workspaces still didn’t work.  So, I remembered a setting in IE that prevented me from deactivating Adobe Creative Suite, the “Automatically detect settings” check box inside “LAN settings” under “Connections” in the IE options panel.  Unchecked it and it worked.  Not exactly a great answer to the problems, but turned out to be a good excuse to clean my system up.

On a completely different note, it looks like Microsoft removed the screen dimming option I liked from Windows 7 RC and RTM.  I’ll find out when my other copy of 7 Ultimate arrives and I toss it on the laptop.  I really liked that on my desktop.  Dang.