I’ve been working this week to make our applications compatible with Internet Explorer 7.

Some background: As a Mac shop, most of our exposure to the pain of the Windows world has been through support emails we receive. But recently we installed Windows Vista in a Parallels virtual machine for IE 7 testing.

Parallels is an indispensable tool that lets us test our applications in all the browsers we support on a single computer. We can even test IE 6 and 7 side-by-side by running Windows XP in one VM and Vista in another. As a web developer, Parallels is easily the single best reason to own an Intel Mac. But starting with Vista’s release, Microsoft wants us to pay for the privilege: you’ll legally only be able to install the most expensive versions (Ultimate and Business) in a VM, even if all you’re doing is clicking on things in IE.

And even testing things in IE isn’t easy. For example, here’s what you see when you click View Source in Vista:

This is just one of the endless confirmation dialogs Microsoft has added in the name of security. Here, the language doesn’t even make sense: No, a “website” doesn’t “want” to “open web content,” I clicked View Source! And the dialog box defaults to not letting me do what I want. So you can’t even trust Vista to do what you tell it to do.

But the most painful experience yet has been installing Microsoft Script Debugger, an ancient artifact used to debug JavaScript in IE. After finding the link on Microsoft’s web site, it takes a stunning 35 clicks through nearly as many dialog boxes just to get the thing installed. (Keep reading for videos and an explanation.)