A rainy Sunday afternoon, so a clear conscience about not being in the garden continuing the spring cleanup that's kept me busy all week.
So here I am, inside build 7100, logged in to NST.
Tried a fresh install with the IR detector unplugged from the TV card, and this time the BSOD changed from the FE (USB_BUG) to a 9F (driver-power-state-failure).
Removed the TV card from the PCI Bus and ran the install with it sitting outside the box.
Finally the install worked without any failures, in the 1/2 hour Mak promised (give or take a few minutes - I was watching some motor racing at the time, so can't be precise).
The install is finally clean. It can shutdown on request without hanging, and WUD is able to auto-reboot as required without needing to be forced.
I'm still disappointed with it (the install - I haven't had time to look round the system yet) because, not only did the TV card completely destroy it, but it has lost the native support of my graphics card and my monitor.
I'm sitting looking at a horrible distorted picture created by the default PnP monitor driver on the default VGA graphics driver. There's no support for my widescreen, only 4:3 resolutions, and auto-updates say "you've got the correct driver".
The ATi site has the driver for this card listed under Vista, but not W7. If I pick it from the list of compatible drivers in the "pick your own" menu of device manager, it refuses to install it because it's "not compatible with this operating system"
Next step is to start-over (I've lost count of how many times I've done this (or tried) now), but this time I'm going to put 7000 back on (that supported everything including the TV card without any fuss) and then try an upgrade Install to 7100 to see it that ends up with a more usable system.