I have not tried Win 7. I do use XP Pro and Vista at work but at home I use sidux (a distribution based on the Debian unstable branch - unstable is a misnomer, in my experience it is rock solid). OK, I am a very experienced Linux user (since 1993) and an engineer, so it is my nature to enjoy the challenge of fixing problems, but fixing problems with Linux is mostly something I rarely have to do nowadays.
Keef, the simplest way to resolve the problem you experienced after changing your video card would have been to run a live cd session and copied the xorg.conf file generated by the live cd and then used that to replace the "broken" xorg.conf file in your other distributions. Another way would have been to do cntrl alt F1 and then run xconfig from the command line.
If you run a Linux Mint or sidux live cd, there is a desktop icon to install the ditribution to the hard disk. From there to a fully working system, complete with applications such as open ofice, gimp, amarok etc takes about 25 minutes on my hardware. Windows 7 gets to basic OS with browser and email and basic apps in the same time, but you then have to spend another 2 or 3 hours to load up the other applications you need (Keef's timing - I havn't tried Win 7 yet).
By the way, virtually all Linux distributions have the good manners to recognise that other OSes are installed on your machine and provide links to them in Grub. Microsoft's assumption that someone who pays for their product is not entitled to retain convenient access to other OSes which may be installed on the their machine is arrogant and despicable.