I was wondering what your favorite version of system 7 is?

I put 7.6.1 on every machine that can handle it. It's my baseline OS for most Quadras, Nubus Powermacs and some PCI Powermacs. The problem is that most machines that can handle 7.6.1 can also handle 8.1 so unless there is a severe memory limitation or something else that can't be overcome, I would prefer to have 8.1 on that machine and many of my machines are also beefy enough to run 8.6 or 9. Any Mac I have that is incapable of running 7.6.1 also has problems with any version of 7.5 so I have to stay with 7.1 or lower on those Macs.

7.1. 7.5 seems only really useful for 68000s and 68020s that can't run 7.6 but need close-to-7.6 features (and was a minefield to boot), and 7.6 seems unnecessary if those machines could just run 8.x, but 7.1 can be made to do nearly everything 7.6 can and runs great on old machines.

That said, I probably wouldn't run 7.1 on a PPC unless I had a very good reason to. None of the PPCs here have less than 8.6 on them.

Yup, for me it's the two current winners. I chose 7.1 partly because it's fun running the earliest Power Macs on 7.1.2.

7.6.1 on G3-accelerated NuBus Power Macs is the best classic Mac experience, in my opinion.

I have to go with 7.6(.1) for '030 Macs and 8.1 for '040 Macs. I remember the nightmare of 7.5 on my Performa 460 (33MHz LC III), and I have no desire to repeat that. On the other hand, all my 68k Macs are 32-bit clean. For PPC Macs, I generally run the highest OS that will fit in the installed RAM comfortably, and that's never any flavor of System 7. 7.x just drives me nuts with it's infuriating lack of multithreading in the Finder and the need to click and hold on menu items (a real pain in the butt for PowerBooks), among other problems.

Peace,
drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!