If you think Vista was a downgrade then, keep on XP, your call. But there are a TON of technical reasons that make Vista and 7 more than recomendable over XP.

Never ran the upgrade advisor, yet I'm running Windows 7 RC1 on one of my older boxes for testing purposes.  This machine was built a while back, right before WoW beta came out, so in today's standards it's not a great machine.  It does however run most modern games on low graphics settings without problems.  This machine previously had XP on it.

That being said, so far I have had no problems with Windows 7.  In fact, I'm still a little suprised how well it works compaired to Vista (which I run on one of my machines and have a number of reasons why I dislike).

I have had no problems running Impulse or Demigod on my Winows 7 machine.

Let me know if you have any further questions re win7 from my experiences.

I have a question, I've noticed that with 3d games they actually ran better under XP than vista.  They will run on a slower proccessor with less ram.  Will they run better on Windows 7, or will they get even worse?  I'm kind of borderline right now, having issues with newer games like Crysis.  I'm afraid that once I upgrade Crysis won't run at all... any thoughts?

It's really going to depend on the OS, there's no solid answer until it's released.  The thing with Vista and 7 is that they both take up more resources than XP on a baseline level.  That is why one some computers once they upgraded to Vista the performance dropped.  We're not going to know how 7 compares to Vista performance wise until it's actually out(well, right now there's a decent idea, but ultimately it won't be set in stone until it's released.)

good point... I didn't see much of a drop in the overall usage, but the 3d gaming has been different... I had to turn the settings down on some games, and that's dissapointing... but I suppose I will end up buying a new system to get windows 7....