Just for anyone curious, I am running Windows 7 now and ZBrush runs totally fine. I did an upgrade from Vista x64 to Windows 7.
If you did the upgrade route, what happens when the Beta expires? Will you be able to reinstall Vista over the expired beta without losing any files? Assuming the final Win7 doesn’t come out for months after.
short answer: no.
you can’t downgrade a MS operating system that I know of, and even if you could I wouldn’t recommend it. As far as the beta expiration- with previous betas MS has recommended a clean install of the retail package instead of trying to upgrade it. Actually they even recommend clean installs between beta versions, but that’s another story.
windows 7 may already be more stable and faster than vista, but it’s still beta- I wouldn’t recommend using it as your primary workstation until it’s released. I’ve got it running on a test machine here, but if it dies one day I’m not going to lose anything of value
The overall info on Windows 7 is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx
And Microsoft specifically recommends that you NOT install it on an important computer. 
That said, a little birdie told me it’s more stable already than Vista was at launch. Of course, we’ll see if he’s still chirping the same tune a month or so from now…
I’m running it at home and I’ve had very minor issues. I can’t really say It’s that much different from Vista nd there are certainly some wonkies in the UI. They have a nice feedback thing though so hopefully that helps. I thought I would just throw the whole discussion out there since some people might be interested in the result and thinking about whether or not it’ll still work. I can’t say I’ve had much time to play with ZB but I am waiting for the next release for that 
does zbrush perform better in W7 then it does in XP64?
How did you get ZBrush to install and run properly on the Windows 7 Beta?
I keep getting license errors. I remember when I tried it on Vista I ended up having to run as administrator but that hasn’t worked. I’ve tried installing with various compatibility modes and evening running in different compatibility modes and administrator with no luck.
Any help would be much appreciated.
EDIT
Apparently I made this more complicated than necessary (very typical of me :o). It seems just installing as normal and running in administrator mode worked.
And I was thinking I was smart in doing all the compatibility mode install stuff off the bat… just made it worse 
Thanks, Kosher, I was curious about this. And since you posted this back in January I’ll assume you were using 3.1 at the time in the Win 7 beta, which is exactly what I aim to do when the full OEM is released. I’m stoked to finally be done with XP.
FYI, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (thanks MSDN ;)) and it works like a charm. I wasn’t able to switch to Vista and I always sticked to XP. I’m running Win 7 at home and office, no problems (except some old hardware, which never worked with Vista anyway…
And about ZBrush, no problems at all. 30 millions of polygons on a mesh recently