Initially I tried installing it on my XP machine to use for development. I found that it's not possible to do this, but there are hacks to install this on Vista.

Then I tried to install it on 64-bit Win2003 to try to minimize the number of VM's I keep. It turns out it has to run in 32-bit mode so you have to switch IIS to run everything in 32-bit mode. Sharepoint kept complaining that it wanted a more recent version of ASP.Net even though I had 3.5 installed.

After fiddling with 64-bit Win2003 unsuccessfully, I punted and installed 32-bit Win2003, but made the mistake of choosing Sharepoint services from the server roles. This unfortunately installed Sharepoint 2003 and WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) 2.0. Running the Sharepoint 2007 upgrade was painful to say the least because a got a cryptic error about not being able to upgrade SKU to SKU which actually meant I needed to uninstall WSS 2.0 before it could install Sharepoint 2007. Got that installed finally then the menu for the Ektron CMS400 Sharepoint Connector's menu item didn't show up in Sharepoint, but at least I got Sharepoint2007 working.

I'm thinking the upgrade screwed up something at this point, so I'm back to reinstalling Win2003 and then installing ASP.Net 3.5 and then Sharepoint 2007 Standalone immediately instead of adding the server role. This is a pretty clean install, and what do I get? An error like this:
10/21/2008 16:19:58 12 ERR An exception occurred while provisioning Shared Service Provider 'SharedServices1'. System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database "SharedServices1_DB_d4fc948b-cc4b-40f2-9ae0-2878858dae77" requested by the login. The login failed.
Login failed for user 'WIN2003\Administrator'.
....
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Data.SqlSession.ExecuteReader(SqlCommand command)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.Upgrade.SharedSearchDatabaseSequence.get_IsApplicable()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPDelegateManager.GetDelegates(Object o)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPDelegateManager.GetUpgraders(Object o)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPManager.NeedsUpgradeFalse(Object o)

So I go back to the Vmware snapshot and try installing Sharepoint 2007 again only to get the same error. Rerunning the configuration wizard seems to get it to finish installing cleanly, but when the installer brings up the Sharepoint home page, what do I see?

Yep, that's real useful. :-(
That turned out to be caused by not giving the VM enough memory. The default of 256MB isn't enough...it needs 512MB or even more. Even with 512MB in the VM, the working set size is 1GB, so it's half swapped out to disk! It's competing w/ Large Wallowing Pig (aka Lotus WorkPlace) for fattest portal app :-P