So it has been a long time since I forced myself to boot into Windows to get support/development work done for the platform. Other than one hard-freeze where the machine updated its drivers, rebooted, and just stopped recognising the keyboard or trackpad, it pretty much just worked (turning it off and on again did, as the IT Crowd suggests, fix the problem).

Setting up a development environment involved:

• install vscode (automatic)
• install vs express (automatic, chose python 3.7 and C/C++)
• setting up system path to add the visual studio python 3.7 to the path (this was fiddly, but it wasn't hard)
• installing the windows version of git

Which is much less of a Royal PITA than it used to be with having to have VS Express 7 and a bunch of obsolete platform SDKs then modify a bunch of system paths and settings and hope you get the whole incantation perfect. Essentially the development setup process was acceptable this time.

Out of curiousity I also installed WSL, but since the only reason I boot Windows is to deal with hardware/platform specific issues with PyOpenGL... it's not much interest to me.

Other than that, the system was pretty much as I remember Windows. There were a bunch of mysterious performance glitches in the GUI (slow downs, stalls waiting for apps or whatever to start, seemingly complete lack of response to input for 20s then 10 things happening at once, audio happening 5s after the event it's suppose to signal, etc), but a basically serviceable desktop and I'm sure you get used to that stuff, just as Linux users get used to out-of-memory events bringing their desktops to their knees.