Help me Intertubes!

Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I need your help.  Against a common enemy.  Microsoft.

It’s sort of annoying, because I’m in the middle of a draft writing about how the Zune HD gets a bad rap because it’s associated with Microsoft, and then I deal with this shitstorm.

I got the Ultimate Steal from Microsoft while it was still $30 to get Windows 7 Professional.  Despite its name, I didn’t get the Ultimate version, but Professional.  In any case, since I had Windows Vista Home Premium, they wouldn’t let me do an upgrade, but instead I had to do a custom clean install.  I didn’t worry too much, because I partition everything.  I have my documents on my D:, my programs on my P:, I have a recovery partition (currently Vista) on my R:, and I have a S: for scratch downloads, and my OS is reserved on the C:.  After a longer headache than necessary, I was able to download Windows 7 and install it, but of course, it didn’t retain any info from my old programs.  I go to check on statistical software for lab — got it to work.  Go to check Photoshop — no!  And the setup files I have won’t let me install on Windows 7 (despite installing just fine on Vista — I get an error about it not being at least XP SP2).  Ok, the biggest problem?  My Office programs.  When I eventually find a setup file, it’s saying my key is not legit (I guess I installed it too many times — but it’s a multi-license key and it is the correct one on my other machines).  Seriously, these are the three programs (and Quicken) that I care about.  I have an empty programs partition for the most part.  No games (I have consoles for that) or any other stupid shit.

Now, I keep on going though everything — I can (and at this rate will) roll back to my previous Vista system because everything is in Windows.old.  Here’s my issue, though: if all the program files on the other partition are intact, why can’t I pull the registry/other information into Windows 7 so it can work?  So far, the new OS has been pretty fast and I would like to give it a test run, but I need to have Photoshop and Office.  I’m in (hopefully) my final year of my Ph.D. program, and I don’t have time or money to set up a new solution with Windows 7 that can’t be fixed in the next two days.  So, if you can help me, that would be great; just please try to minimize the laughing at me.  I’m not a programmer, but I can do most things if people explain it to me, including registry editing.  I await any help…