just out of pure curiosity i went ahead and did another fresh clean install of 7 using the sp1 u image and i must say that only having to download 50 updates and having only 8gb used from home premium i'm pretty happy. saved me about 5 to 6gb of space from the overgrown winsxs folder of a 7 rtm install plus updates. other than having to set all my personal settings to my liking and reinstalling all my software it was worth it for how i use the space on one of my HDDs that's dedicated specifically to my OSes and their backup images. any extra space i can manage on 7's 30GB partition is worth the trouble here. so if you need the space, i recommend it
yeah same old slow booting than fresh install. It builds such a lot of stuff no matter how well you manage it.