Similar with me.
I still use some old DOS programs and early Windows programs that have no updates and have no good modern equivalents.
They run fine under WindowsXP, but I wonder whether they would run under 7.
I use an IE6-based tabbed browser that has some add-on tools that are not available for IE7 or IE8, and I don’t want to give them up.
I keep looking at the new machines with Win7, but haven’t convinced myself to buy yet.
Try dowloading Dosbox, it is free and will run an actual dos window(not the fake one that XP has)and will run any dos program ever made. It works on XP and Vista so I would imagine it will run on Win7.
I have the same situation; I have Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, and many of my old DOS and Win95 apps don’t run in Windows 7...
However, the free Windows XP (32 bit) virtual PC works perfectly, including real-time hardware access. Download the virtual PC for Windows 7, and you end up with a complete version of 32 bit XP that you can run in its own process, and has all the capabilities of normal XP Pro.