Quote - Regarding a clean install of Win7 from WinXP, would installing another clean drive as the boot drive and keeping the original boot drive in the system help at all?
I always install my applications to another drive anyways so they are never on the boot drive. However, Windozs has a nasty habit of spreading configuration files all over the boot drive.
I already have 6 drives in my system so another is no big deal.

I had no problem when installing the beta I just installed it to a partition in a seperate drive(I didnt disconnect the xp drive at all) and I can select either Win 7 64 bit or XP 32 bit when I start up the computer. some of the software (including all my versions of poser) I didn't even have to reinstall I created a shortcut to the .exe and they worked fine in win7.