Ok, The IE7 quircks are fixed, and thank god you can turn that cleartype rendering off, so IE7 beta2 is back on my system.

Great shock: All the flash objects are inactive by default, you have to click on them to make them active! WTF????

Turns out this is due to a software patent by eolas which sued Microsoft for embedding objects directly into the html ...
Jeez, yet another example of the brainless stupidity of the software patent system.
Wasn't that supposed to be a good thing?
It seems that most software patents are used to slow down technical progress.

Luckily, there's a quick fix available, but it still requires me to update about a thousand webpages ...
No Fun !