I guess I'm not enough of a nerd to see what exactly the problem is with the RC. It seems far more stable than XP ever was.

Hehe thanks, I walked around with a swelled head all night and it had nothing to do with recovering from that dental surgery

How'd that go, by the by?

It was the highlight of last week. When the highlight is having teeth pulled out while awake and at half 8 in the morning, its rather depressing all told but its done and feeling probably 80% better now. Still hurts to laugh but thats mostly okay since I've only felt like laughing a few times since it happened. I can pretty much eact real food again, it'll be a LONG time until I have soup again I can tell you that.
Well not THAT long sadly, I've still got to get the other half of my mouth done

Hickabicka wha?

First thing I noticed was the complete lack of options provided during installation. Sure, that's great if you have the mental capacity of a farmyard animal. But the rest of us don't always want to install using the default options. Especially when it comes to OS.
Secondly, the dual boot menu had gone. Which is probably a by-product of the lack of options during install. Win 7 beta created that automatically. RC removed it. Maybe being able to dual boot was too much competition for their XP compatibility mode - which carries an extra £100 on the £70 price tag of Home...
It also buggered up the drive letters. My secondary drive is now C. The DVD is F. And like a church rave, there is no E to be found anywhere.
Finally - now this is where I pretty much gave up right away - it chose not to recognise my secondary hard drive. Which is now the C. Even though it's also NTFS. Even though beta had no problems recognising it.
Why? Who knows? There wasn't any means to recover it so, given that I had all the programs and security install files on there waiting, I had to give up on that bloody horrible mess. Especially considering that it doesn't ship with an internet browser in the EU.
The only problem I had with the beta was that my sound card drivers didn't work with it. Which was fair enough. Especially given that on board sound worked fine.

Personally I feel 7 is the best Windows yet, but I'm Mac biased and appreciate the changes to the Windows dock - sorry, new taskbar - and spotlight - eh, Windows search I mean.
:-P
I could do with being able to put tags/labels on more file types than mp3 audio, jpeg images and ms office documents though - I'd like to put tags on zip/rar/7zip archives, png images, various adobe files (predominantly photoshop and illustrator). Spotlight/Finder on Mac OS X does this, Explorer should be able to as well (the file system (NTFS) certainly has support for random extra data), possibly with the warning that comments/tags to anything other than the aforementioned filetypes won't be copied to non-NTFS filesystems (burned discs, usb sticks using FAT16/FAT32/exFAT, network discs without support for NTFS streams, etc).
And I may be mistaken now, but didn't microsoft say that upgrading from a pre-release (beta/rc) to a later pre-release is not supported, meaning stuff may (and probably will) break?
I didn't upgrade, but rather formatted the system drive (which had Vista on it) and installed 7 RC from scratch, I do have all documents and important stuff other drives so formatting isn't much of a deal for me.

Personally, I didn't upgrade. I formatted the drive and started from scratch. Which makes the problems I faced all the more inexplicable.

Ah, in that case I agree, it is rather strange. Did you get the drive to work somehow? Is it present in the drive manager? (right click computer -> manage -> storage -> disk management).
I've had drive letters rearranged before (actually, every single time I reinstalled Windows since I began using multiple drives many years ago), but I cannot say I've had one disappear except for drive failure.

I've had it with SATA drivers not being installed, maybe the motherboard's drivers aren't 100% compatible with vista/7. I've noticed this a lot with VIA chipset boards

+1 for this line alone.
I have nothing useful to contribute to this discussion, but I just had to single that gem out.

I always remove the power to every hard drive bar the one I'm installing onto, saves any confusion with drive letter assignments and other physical drives having boot information

Strange, it's not on a separate IDE/SATA controller from the other drive(s) is it? Do the device manager complain about missing drivers?