DavidM wrote

This is a bit OT but I know that there are people here
with experience of PCs and usually very helpful.

My old XP PC is starting to play up and I'm planning on replacing
it in the next few weeks. Currently looking at machines from the
Chillblast range as they seem to get consistently good reports.

I still assemble my PCs from parts with all except laptops and netbooks.

You do need to know what you are doing more tho.

A couple of areas where I'd appreciate
and views and/or recommendations:

Version of W7.
Most of the systems I'm looking at come with Windows Home Premium,

Yeah, that's pretty typical now.

but with a cost option to have Windows Professional. Win Prof has
XP compatibility, which I might/will need for some older programs
I use which aren't (and may never be) compatible with W7.

Yes, that's the main reason for home users
to go with Pro instead of Home Premium.

The virtual XP has one real downside tho, particularly you don't have
any control over the screen resolution in the virtual XP and I don't
find that Outlook Express is really viable readability wise with that.

I'd try virtual box if I did want to run XP on a Win7 system for OE.

There doesn't seem to be any other advantage to
me for Win Prof, but someone may think differently?

That's correct.

Mail client.
I currently use Outlook Express, which isn't
available on W7, so I need an alternative.

The main alternative is Windows Live Mail 14.

Not the latest version because that doesn't even bother to
quote usenet posts when replying to them, but 14 does fine
and is very close to Outlook Express and does fix some of the
quirks in OE that never did get fixed like the spelling checker.

One downside with WLM is that it has a separate inbox
for each POP3 email account which makes searching in
your old emails not as convenient as with OE. And you
cant run QuoteFix anymore with WLM wither.

Outlook is a possible alternative but has
many features I'll never use (and will cost).

It doesn't do usenet.

Windows Live mail may do the job but I played with early versions
and wasn't impressed with it's reliability - it may be ok now.

Its actually moved on to Windows Live Mail now
for Win7 and 14 is very decent reliability wise.

Mandatory requirements a support POP/SMTP
and IMAP from multiple email providers;

That last is where Outlook gets a bit tricky.

allow two or more email accounts for different users of PC with
privacy; allow downloaded email to be left on the providers server
(where supported eg Hotmail), allow at least basic filtering to direct
incoming mail to different folder, support dlists or address groups.

WLM 14 does all of that fine and does usenet too.

And the user interface is pretty close to OE so you
are unlikely to have a major problem there too.

Desire able: allow import of old emails from OE (the wife and
I have quite a lot of emails that we need to retain and have
access to; allow import of addresses from OE address book.

WLM 14 does all of that fine.

Any advice gratefully received (but I'm not going the
Unix route, so please don't waste your time suggesting
this option, though I know that some prefer it!).

I'd go WLM 14 in your case, on Home Premium.

In fact I have done that myself when I moved from XP.

I do run Win7 Ultimate tho for reasons that arent relevant to your choice.

I doubt you will regret the move to Win7,
its got quite a few useful improvements on XP.

I choose to run an 8GB ram system running 64 bit Win7 and
have had no regrets. While you may not use your system as
intensively as I do, the extra 4GB of ram costs peanuts.