Well I decided that with RC2 I would at least make an effort to give x64 another chance on my machine. Worst that could happen is that I format in anger and go back to x86, so here's the story.
I was talking to Robert on Friday and told him that I wanted to try it just for the heck of it. (Actually I told him to tell the Windows Beta team I was trying it again and the proverbial *** may hit the fan again lol). So I burned the x64 ISO and prepped for an install that in my mind was destined for miserable failure given the driver signature BS and all that happy stuff. So it installed, I left to run a few errands while it did it's thing and when I came back I did the post-setup username, date/time, computer name stuff and let it log in. Everything came with drivers except my, yep you guessed it, my X-FI sound card. So I had a thought, the XP x64 drivers for the X-FI are WHQL signed, so let's try those. Ran the installer as admin (don't worry, I disabled UAC shortly after this :P) and it, wait, it INSTALLED?! OMG! I rebooted and to my disbelief i heard sound on shutdown! When it came back up sound was working as well as audio console so I now have full 5.1. Awesome, but I know it's gonna trip up on my iPod, let's plug it in shall we? Plugged it in and, wait, it had inbox signed drivers? HOLY CRAP! Installed iTunes 7 and everything works with my iPod. Ok now I must be dreaming because the last time i tried x64 I wanted to shoot someone after 10 minutes. Needless to say I have been on x64 since yesterday and I haven't had anything to really complain about.
So I really have to hand a kudos to Microsoft for shaping up x64, but I still think there should be a way to disable the driver signing check for the short term to make the transition a little bit easier for people who aren't fortunate enough to have WHQL drivers available for all of their devices.