[Sorry for the long message. A download at the could make it worthwhile.] It's not an uncommon situation. I have several large documentation sets I maintain that are on FrameMaker 7.0, and it's likely that's where management says they will stay for now.
I personally have seen some of the problems that have been reported with running older versions of Frame on Windows Vista and Windows 7. I had tried using the compatibility settings that Windows Vista and 7 provide. The settings helped in Windows Vista, but actually made things worse in Windows 7. I would get the graphic frame dragging crashes, and have very sluggish performance of the application even on very fast hardware. My solution was to create a compatiblity shim that installs on the system. A compatibility shim is a standard way to control operating system settings for a specific program, allowing it to be more compatible with the base operating system. A compatibility shim provides much more control over the settings than the basic compatibility settings provided by the base operating system. I have been using the first version of this shim for a few years. I just recently had to update it to work on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. It makes Frame 7 function very much like it did on Windows XP. Since there has been some discussion about this, I decided to make the compatibility software available for download. You can get it from the Downloads page at the Silicon Prairie Software web site: http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com It's way down at the bottom of the Downloads page. Like the other software on the site, it's available as Shareware. If you try the software and it helps you out, please consider paying the token shareware fee. This one is entirely on the honor system! :-) Hopefully you see the same benefits of the compatibility shim that I have. Steve