Dang, man, you sure ask a lot of questions about a gift horse. Well, I'm pretty sure that the online download version doesn't come with the nifty gift wrapping that says "World's Greatest Dad," but beyond that I make no guarantees. It's been a while since I did my own update, but I think it may have been possible to update individual programs within the suite. All I can say for sure is that no one has ever referred to a program in Nero 7 and I check and say, "Hey! Why don't I have that?" I suppose that once they're trying to sell you v. 9 it doesn't make much sense to continue distinguishing between 7 Premium and 7 Ultra.

What I can warn you against from bitter experience is installing the free OEM version of 8 or 9 that comes with a DVD writer. I did that once. It uninstalled my Nero 7 Premium or Ultra, whatever--let's call it Complete, shall we?--and put in a crippled version of Nero 8 Express that was missing half of Nero's features--the good half, IMHO. And you wouldn't believe the fight it put up when I tried to reinstall Nero 7 Complete (fortunately, I had moved the v.7 install files beforehand to a directory named NeroVII on another drive, so it didn't find and delete them). I still have the scars from that battle. See this big gash on my hard drive?