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#11
Did you get the Acer Upgrade Kit with a Win7 clean copy DVD and an Acer apps/drivers disk which allows you to choose programs and drivers you need?
We have two of those here, and the DVD is indeed bootable to do the cleanest possible install: Custom using Advanced drive tools to format before clean install. It even has the product key sticker attached.
I would recommend it as any in-place upgrade no matter how successful carries over corruption from the previous installation. You will be starting fresh then which is what you want when you are migrating to such a vastly improved OS.
I admire your persistence with Acer tech support but I can confirm it is some of the worst I have seen. I hope Tara passes the word along to MS since they require a level of support for their Upgrade disks when manufacturers provide the support. I get no response to email, and phone calls relating to Upgrade are referred to an FAQ on their fulfillment agency's website.
In fact, any real support from Acer is going to need to be done by calling as though you still have Vista on the system, but this will not help in this case since there is no comparable backup in Vista. Even so, I still had to call multiple times to find an agent to help me troubleshoot issues like Vista bluescreen as the incompetence was shocking.
Before reinstalling you might want to check the formatting on your external, run sfc /scannow to check integrity of all OS files after Upgrade, and finally do a Repair Install to refresh the OS, however it rarely replaces all corruption carried over from Vista.