I’m going to call this solved.
TL;DR is that my Win 7 pro ISO was a piece of junk; I had to go get another. (Thanks jevank for triggering that thought process.)
However you might find the following observations useful:
Mostly, jevank got me to look at other ISOs, so he gets a good bit of credit for this. The ISO I started with was bad, apparently. I found another windows 7 pro ISO but the source might be kind of dodgy (fortunately my windows AppVM qube won’t communicate with anything). The name was of the same format as the Ultimate ISO he pointed me to, and of almost if not exactly the same size (my original one was much smaller).
A couple of observations:
- supposedly windows 7 ISOs come with a file (sources/ei.cfg) that if absent, will cause the installer to prompt you to select which one (pro, home, ultimate, whatever) it will install. (Note that you what you install has to match your license key, though!) The recommended Ultimate ISO doesn’t have this file but even so, won’t give you the choice. I tried to grab the ei.cfg file from my (defective) windows pro ISO, to sort of force the ultimate ISO to install Pro anyway, but I couldn’t for the life of me make even a thumbdrive made from the ultimate ISO not read only (and yes I tried hdparms). I have no idea if this idea would have worked or not.
1a) The pro ISO really didn’t like one or the other of the two optional xen drivers. I don’t recall if I tried using all three with the Ultimate ISO pointed to by jevank above.
1b) one of the peculiarities of the bad ISO I had was that the confirmation dialogs that come up during QWT installation don’t look like the ones in the documentation. I originally ascribed this to differences between pro and ultimate; but no it is the difference between an ISO that will work here, and one that won’t.
1c) [edit to add] I just realized I should go back to the site where I found the pro ISO and download their ultimate ISO…and compare it with the one from the microsoft site. If they are identical, then they probably didn’t monkey with the pro ISO. If they aren’t, they probably did.
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After install of QWT, but even before I enabled seamless mode in the registry, it was acting very wonky, with the qube apparently running but nothing opening. This appears to be at least in part due to the windows user ID (my initials) not matching the one on qubes (user). This is fixable (and documented as such) with qw-prefs, changing the default user to what it actually is…but probably ought to be emphasized…this MUST be done before you install QWT. (Better yet would be for the QWT installer to somehow take care of that…if that’s even possible, which it probably isn’t. However, since you have to fire the whole process up from dom0 perhaps it could be done automagically there?)
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Some of the apps I have installed on Windows (Micro$haft Office, Libre Office [and yes I do need both]) initially open full screen. If you are in seamless mode when you start the app for the first time, this causes really wonky behavior: You end up trying to resize a gargantuan window and the app likes to scroll your document page off the screen as you try to shrink the window. This is easily fixed by shifting out of seamless mode, un-fullscreening the app, perhaps manually shrinking the window a bit, then going back to seamless. [Note: For all I know this is only an issue for dual-monitor setups.]
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It’s really strange using windows without a start menu! (Of course switching away from seamless gives it back to you.) When you start the qube for the first time, it seems like all of the apps included with windows show up in the flyout from the Q menu (upper left menu) [and probably also from the right mouse button menu from the desktop]. Going into qubes settings shows all the apps on the left side (meaning they shouldn’t be displayed). To clear this up, move them all to the right, apply, then move them back to the left and hit apply. Then construct the list how you like (I ended up with windows explorer [the file manager] and command.com [the terminal] and a couple of apps over on the right hand side; more apps after I installed them). This same process repeats after you make an AppVM from the template VM [if that’s what you did, rather than just a standalone], only this time in order to clear it up you have to refresh the list of apps, which takes five to ten minutes because it will fire up the templateVM as well as the App VM; and then do the two-step I just described.
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Probably the only genuine bug, and it’s really a user interface complaint: On the settings window, the two buttons that enable and disable seamless mode…one of them should always be desensitized [the one that puts you in the mode you’re already in]. Better yet, it should be a checkbox that reads “Seamless mode” or “Enable seamless mode” and always sensitized when there is such a thing for that vm as “seamless mode.”