For those of you still interested in Virtual PC 7, or running Vista on your PowerPC..

I wrote an article on my website about running Virtual PC 7 under Leopard (under which it loses its ability to access optical drives):

http://www.pwrmac.com/2008/10/29/vpc7_with_leopard_and_vista/

I also included some VPC benchmarks, a tutorial to running Vista on your PowerPC, and a (sad) Word 2007 vs. Word 2008 start up video comparison: 12.6 seconds for Word 2008 to start up natively, and only 9.6 seconds for Word 2007 under emulation.

I just thought I should post this in case anyone was still interested in using Virtual PC 7. Which is a very small population of Mac users I'm sure

mkrishnan said:

You know... as much as I regret saying it, at that point, you might almost seriously consider something like... buying a very low cost PC (e.g. the Eee Box), setting it up and then running it headless on your network, and remote desktop-ing to it. That wouldn't be free -- it'll cost you about $300. But it'll be much, much faster, and a device like the Eee Box would be very physically small and low power, so it wouldn't really clutter up your space.

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No I understand, this argument has been made many times. I don't need to use windows programs nearly enough to warrant the purchase of a new pc, you know what I mean? It's more there for connivence. Things like checking compatibility with (windows) Office 2007, or using a feature that's not available in the mac version, or doing something like trying out software thats not available for mac that I'm curious about(like the Google Chrome Beta)

hogmog said:

This post explains a lot. As well as breaking the optical drive I think Leopard has also broken the ability to use USB sticks with VPC as well. Have had to copy new applications/application updates to the 'shared' drive on powerbook HDD and then install software from there.

VPC will have to keep going for some time to come - with the substantial hike in Macbook prices over here have abandoned the idea of replacing my trusty PB.

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Yes installing the boot camp drivers will fix this as well. Usb sticks/usb devices (cameras etc) will function fine after installing the boot camp drivers.