@ Klaus

I'll try that again, but I think something's broken here.
Do you know of a successful instance of VB with my hardware setup?
If so, that would motivate me to persevere.
The ticket 5343 docket is pretty discouraging; I interpret it to
indicate lots of folks with my hardware setup are not getting the
results they'd expect with a Win7 host arrangement.

@ Capricorny

You force me to reveal yet another layer of my ignorance.
I think I've done poor man's installs to linux-formatted partitions,
but I thought the rule was NEVER to write linux stuff to ntfs.
Virtual box didn't seem like a violation of that rule.
Kindly point me to some reading material.
Re-formatting was my initial interest; VirtualBox is interesting,
but I can come back to that.

@ Werner

One thing I do know; I don't want to further partition the hard drive
on this laptop. As it stands, I don't have to worry about grub or lilo,
I can select my OS-du-jour just by using the built-in media select
to use HDD/DVD or USB. If I can do a 'poor-man's install' to the ntfs
without clobbering the Win7, that'll probably serve. That's where all
my Gbs are right now.

Again, thanks to all.