A little background: I work for a large (50k emp) company. We only just (Q2 this year) officially got rid of Win2k as a supported desktop. There is no way we will be ready for Win7 anytime soon. There are many issues an organization like mine faces:

-Training - non-IT people have jobs to do beyond "messing with computers". Computers aren't toys for these people, they are tools. Changing tools requires re-training.
-Training - IT people, frankly, are lazy and don't like to learn new things any more than non-IT people. Yes, there are exceptions, but lets not pretend that all tech folks are super eager to change to the latest and greatest all the time. (I really do wonder why so many geeks still write user level apps in C and like the command line.)
-Interaction - We have a very complex environment where many things are setup to interact "just so". Is this bad? Yes, but it's the way things are. Implementing a large change like WinXP->Win7 requires a HUGE amount of testing of sometimes very subtle differences.
-Legacy - We have mission critical applications (both in house and 3rd party) that are not ready to deploy on Win7 without substantial work. Could they have been developed differently so that this wouldn't be the case? Yes. AND they weren't.

To be fair, this is not a question of WinXP-to-. It a fundamental issue with how IT resources are used. While I would like to lay a lot of the blame at MS' feet, it's really an industry issue. Having (and USING) frameworks to enable forward migration is an issue technology has been facing for 40+ years. There are a handful of solutions that have been proposed and even implemented. They amount to little more than academic curiosities since they are not widely deployed.

Oh well. Here's looking toward the big news of 2020 as we finally start moving away from Win7!

I've just finished my first semester of grad school after a 7-8 year break. My undergrad is in Comp Sci, I'm getting an MBA now. I'm also in night school, as opposed to full time, but here's what I'd suggest...

1. As much as possible, take at least half the course load in relativly "easy" courses. (To the degree such things exist in grad school...)

2. Forget about a social life for the first semester. Concentrate on school work (see #3)

3. Over prepare. In under grad, I'd usually just skim the text and do as little (ungraded) homework as possible to get a handle on the material. Since you've been away, spend lots of extra time even going over unassigned problems.

4. Get the "answer guides" for text books, when possible. If you use them appropriately (ie: AFTER you do the homework) you'll be able to see what you got wrong and maybe even have time to email the profs or get other assistance.

While I don't know how grad schools in general think, my school (William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA) places less emphasis on undergrad work the longer you've been out of school.