Well, I took the plunge and set up IE7 on my testing machine. As a precaution I made sure to run the usual system tools (Adaware, Spybot) and clean up the system a bit and then created a Restore Point before initializing the install. I've been using it for the past week or so and it seems to be a pretty decent browser (so far). Can I just say bravo regarding the print preview function and draggable margins! This is a beyond useful addition. Subscribing to feeds is super simple and I like that there's explanatory text for the new-to-feeds user. My big regret is that I'm not too thrilled about it's hysteria about phishing - stuff like this could create a whole new neuroses amongst the joe/jane users of the internet. But I guess it's not MS if it's not helpfully in your face all the time.

At any rate, testing on IE7 alone won't cut it as I expect there will be a long transition from IE6 over to IE7 so I came across this handy tool to install multiple standalone versions of IE as a bundle. Cool. (Not that anything pre IE6 has been a concern to us but it's kind of fun to see how broken things are for those users who haven't upgraded for the last 7 years or so...). By adding the quicklaunch icons to the taskbar you now get a whole suite of IE's to test from.