I bought a new 17" HP "Entertainment" notebook with 6GB RAM, and it came with Vista-64, (which I wiped off as soon as I received the machine....Total junk.) I'm running the RC (Release Candidate) version of Windows-7/64-bit, and as much as I hated Vista, Win-7 is actually pretty decent. I pre-ordered the Win7/Professional, which officially comes out on Thursday, and will upgrade my machine to that as soon as I get it. It appears that most new machines with 3GB and up will ship with the 64-bit version pre-installed. So, yes, this IS going to be an issue.
I could not get the VSC to work on it. I forked over the $40 to go with Coyote/Forte, and that seems to work pretty well, but it's a shame to have to spend $40 to get to the same place as the product that used to work so well for free. As an FYI, I also bought a new Creative X-Fi/Notebook card to go with the machine, since my older Audigy2/ZS-Notebook is a PCMCIA card, and the new notebook only accepts the "Express" form-factor cards.
The club where we typically work has quite a bit of ambient hum that's introduced into our system between the output of the notebook (the Creative X-Fi card), and the inputs of the P.A. I went to Radio Shack and picked up an inline filter, (Radio Shack "Ground Loop Isolator", catalog number: 270-054), and that gets rid of almost all the hum.
One last thing.... I've been fighting the problem with wildly varying output levels between songs for years. It's really noticeable between songs created with "RealTracks" and those that are native MIDI-only. I discovered that by using the "Freeze" option, even on the MIDI-only tracks, and creating .WAV files for EVERYTHING we do, and then going back with a 3rd-party utility and using the "Normalize" feature on the .WAV files AFTER they are "frozen", I rarely have to touch the computer's output level the whole night.
We've actually got it working pretty well now, and hopefully the upgrade to the consumer/offical release of Windows-7 will be a relatively minor upgrade for me, and won't require reloading all of the apps, and reconfiguring all of the "Virtual-XP" programs I had to create to get around application-incompatibility with Windows'7.
Hope that helps.