Cleared out a spare partition and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Took 90 minutes before I saw the desktop which wasn't impressive given Vista takes all of 30 minutes to do the same.
But that's nothing compared to the fact that it's almost totally unresponsive once it gets to the desktop. Even trying to get task manager and My Computer loaded failed!
I hope for its sake that it was just busy doing some 1-time initialization or whatever. A fast quad core with plenty of RAM really shouldn't be struggling with viewing the start menu [lol]
Oh well, glad that Vista supports Direct3D 11 [headshake]