Wired's GadgetLab Web site has published a piece by Brian X. Chen listing "7 Reasons to Avoid Windows 7."

A top reason, Chen writes, is the lack of support for direct XP-to-Windows 7 upgrades. Microsoft recommends "clean" installations, which involves saving all applications and data on another drive, wiping the PC's hard drive and installing Windows 7 fresh on the hard drive.

Chen correctly notes that this shouldn't be a huge deal, since responsible parties are backing everything up constantly anyway. But, he notes: "But we understand why this would bug many XP users. For one, it’s time-consuming. For another, many are sensitive about their data, and they don’t trust Microsoft. (We don’t blame them.) Third, if XP is working fine for you, why fix something that isn’t broken?"

We saw much the same back in February.

While I gave a presentation on this, Thursday, at XChange '09 in Washington, D.C. (you can check out the PowerPoint here), one solution provider argued that folks at Microsoft have put together a work-around making it, in fact, possible to go from XP to Windows 7 without a clean install or interceding upgrade to Vista. (The workaround would include altering the registry of the XP system, he said.)

Even if that's the case, it's not a work-around that Microsoft officially supports and, in fact, the company is recommending the "clean" installation route.  Other commentators, including  The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, have recently begun pointing out the XP-to-Windows-7 upgrade fiasco.

And other rumblings I've begun hearing this week from well-connected industry sources are beginning to cast doubt on whether Windows 7 will have any success in business accounts despite all the improvements over Windows Vista.

October, when Windows 7 launches, will bring more answers.