No, I haven’t got any inside information about when Microsoft plans to refresh the current beta release of Windows 7 with the promised Release Candidate. But I have taken a hard look at the leaked build 7048, currently floating around the Internet. It includes a slew of post-beta changes checked in as part of the Release Candidate development cycle.
I’ve been working for several days on this mammoth post for ZDNet, complete with image gallery. (Did you know there are 13 new sound schemes included with the latest build?) Go check it out and let me know what you think:
Post
A sneak peek at the Windows 7 Release Candidate
Image gallery
21 changes to look for in the Windows 7 Release Candidate
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Your Friendfeed doubles up on the same named link when you link/ad-post on this link to note your ZDNet blog getting updated.
That sentence makes my head hurt! I’ll check it out.
when you link/ad-post on this blog*
Sorry. Typo. It makes my head hurt too!
Out of curiosity, how did you get the build? I see that you mention file sharing in the article, but I hope you didn’t do that 😛
I was raised on Woodward and Bernstein, so my sources must remain confidential. 😉 I can tell you, however, that this was not an officially sanctioned release but I am confident of its provenance.
I just upgraded my 7000 build to 7048 and now have no jump lists. Have you seen this on any of your test rigs?
All my jump lists are there. If you did an upgrade from 7000 to 7048, that might be the reason. Frankly, I never do a beta-over-beta install.
I actually was just poking around the JCXP.net forums and someone had a similar problem. I had “Store and display recently opened items in the start menu and the taskbar” in “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” disabled. Re-enabling it gave me jump lists back.
In 7000, I had this disabled because I only wanted my Explorer favorites to display in JLs, rather than both those and my recently opened locations.
Now, the JL is only the original four libraries, even though I created two more. I haven’t rebooted or played around with explorer since I enabled JLs again though.
ed:
can you tell me if the annoying spinning cherio is gone while ie feeds are updating. the cursor keeps changing to the “working in background” cursor keeps flashing in 7000.