Brian said:
If you get anything above the Home edition of Windows 7, you get XP Mode
support. That gives you a license to Windows XP which runs in a transparent
VM (once you also install VirtualPC). This is called Windows VirtualPC (or
WVPC). With that license of Windows XP, you can run the OE in that VM.
Of course, you could still use VirtualPC 2007 as a standalone VMM (virtual
machine manager), install a pre-7 version of Windows in a guest OS, and use
OE from there.
I, too, figured that the lack of an e-mail client, and specifically OE
(which always came bundled with IE), meant that you couldn't install and
then use OE on Windows 7. I was corrected by those who have done it using
WVPC (who also inhabit the microsoft.public.virtualpc newsgroup), plus I
found articles that provide step-by-step instructions on how to setup WVPC
so OE was usable, like:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/Win7xpmode-IE6OE6
You can either use the XP Mode included in a non-Home edition of Windows 7
or use VirtualPC 2007 as a standard VMM and install your choice of Windows
as a guest OS and which does let you use OE6 there.