It's been awhile but tonight I booted up my parent's new machine and installed much of the software I said I was going to install in my previous post.

I am a bit concerned that the interface to Windows 7 is so significantly different from XP that my parents will be lost (at least for a short while). Since I don't run Windows I was very surprised at what looks like a fairly radical shift in some of the design (although there are some familiar elements). Hopefully the software I have chosen to place on their computer will just work. My confidence level (based entirely on past experience) is currently very low. I was hedging on purchasing a gotomypc.com subscription but I now think it wil be very useful. Especially for the short term. Once the machine is up and running at my parent's home I assume Dell support will be able to take over from there.