Wow, I would hate to have to back that up with floppies. 

Thanks for the advice about sending Waves licenses to the cloud cclarry. I would have never thought of that.

Installation was quick and painless here. I opted for "keep all existing files" option and am happy to say everything arrived intact. And everything works too. Even SSL plugs which I had read somewhere were not compatible are working fine.

And Windows 8 so far is great fun. 

I created a "Windows 8 Warning" thread after my lovely experience.  However, I was able to fix everything (with a few compliance updates from 3-rd party plugins).  Basically, every problem I was having boiled down to a permissions issue.  During the Win 7 x64 to Win 8 x64 upgrade, permissions were changed all over the place.  Plugins/apps that had read/write access to certain folders suddenly had read-only access.  I had to AGAIN set many apps to "run as administrator".  These flags were also reset curtesy of the upgrade.

Can the upgrade be done to a new drive leaving the original (Win 7) drive unmodified?

1st step is to image the drive.

And then clone the disk to the new disk. Remove the "old" disk from the machine during the upgrade.

This will not create a dual boot.

To do that you will need to clone the disk and then use easyBCE to modify the boot stuff with both w7 disks in the machine.

Then run the disk and choose which install to update.

Thanks