Re: 32/64 bit
"i don't really care about all the other versions, i just want a single disk with both 32bit and 64bit on, that installs the appropriate version based on your processor."
Scarily enough, I think there is enough *code* (rather than images and documentation) in the Win7 distro that providing it in both flavours might require an extra disk.
"that way anyone with a 64bit procesor, pretty much everyone now, would be using the 64bit version, which means people might actually start developing 64bit software, rather than just the few bits and pieces out there that take advantage of it at the moment."
This is wrong-headed. There were two compelling reasons to switch from Win16 to Win32. Firstly, even fairly modest applications were using *far* more than 64K and paying a penalty in memory management. Secondly, Win32 brought a whole shedload of new features, like memory protection, threads, user-level security, etc.
Neither is true for the 32-64 switch. There are a handful of applications that benefit from more than a gigabyte of working memory, and those have largely already been ported. Win64 offers no new API features. The Win32 version is fine, and will continue to be fine for the next decade or so.
I've lost count of how many typedefs Microsoft now have for 32 and 64-bit integers, every single one of which is right in some cases and wrong for others. Microsoft first announced the scheme some time in the last century. The almost complete lack of take-up suggests that I wasn't the only one to decided almost immediately that it would *never* be worth the effort. Frankly, if I'm going to port my code to a new platform, grovelling over every line and type declaration wondering how to stop the compiler from screaming, I'll port it to something like Qt on Linux/OSX, because that would actually let me sell to new customers.
I felt the same way when .NET came along. Microsoft have now offered me two new platforms with more a limited customer base than Win32 and no perceptible feature benefits. I've said no on both occasions, preferring to spend the time adding stuff that my customers want. I'm funny that way. Maybe that's why I still have a job.