Bizarre Windows behavior

Some bizarre things I've seen with Windows 7 Ultimate thus far:

1. No loopback device. I had an ISO of Office 2010 on my network share, I copied it over to Windows 7 and... err... now what? I ended up exporting it to the Linux virtual machine as a virtual CD, mounting it in the Linux VM, then re-exporting it via Samba to Windows as a share.
2. Windows 7 won't browse my workgroup. No way, no how. I can go directly to the Run prompt and type in "\\linserver\office" and get my Office share, but it won't automagically populate its network neighborhood thingy in the left margin of Windows Explorer with my workgroup shares. It's not that Samba is misconfigured. My MacBook properly populates *its* left margin with the Samba server and expands to show the shares when I click on it, as well as showing the share I exported from Windows 7.f
3. Windows 7 won't do a thing when I click "Map Network Drive". Nothing. Nada. I remember that in the Xen installation of Windows 7 it certainly worked fine, it popped up a dialogue and all that, but now that it's native nothing -- zero -- happens when I click on that item.
4. Probably related to Homegroups. This is the only Windows 7 system on my network, so Homegroups is utterly useless. I attempt to change it and... nada. Nothing. Won't let me leave the homegroup.

Computers are supposed to be deterministic. Windows 7 isn't -- its behavior appears to be semi-random, operating upon a logic that Boole and Von Neumann would not have recognized. So have you had weird things happen with Windows 7? Curious penguins want to know!

-ELG