Sue
Recorder 3.3 will work with Windows 7 Home Edition. There may be no need, therefore, for you to consider the Professional Edition. Martin H has been running this combination of R3 and W7-HE on his laptop for several months. The only problem he had was with using the Recorder 3 mapping facility Plot5. However, I found a way around that......I can't remember what I did now, but I remember that the key thing was that Plot5 still generated the file "sqlist.txt". This file contains the map coordinates for the selected species, and is overwritten each time you call up a new species map in Recorder. What I probably did was to copy this file from the Plot5 folder in Recorder to DMAP's "dmapw" folder on c:\ drive, then double-clicked the application "R2DW.exe" (this is Mike Thurner's Recorder/DMAP link) in the same folder, and the relevant map is generated in DMAP.
As you will know, generating maps one at a time is very laborious. If I want to generate maps of my entire water beetle dataset, or of selected species, I export a relevant dataset from R3 to R6 - it can be done directly now, no need to bother with spreadsheets etc - and import the data into an empty nbndata folder. It is essential that you take a copy of the empty folder when you first operate R6. If you haven't done so, then get another installation disc from a supplier. I generate DMAPs very speedily using Aditlink (see my post in "Add-ons and 3rd party tools"). I back-up the nbndata file when I want to generate another load of maps, give it a name to identify its contents in case I want to use it again, then restore the backup of the original empty nbndata file and run the R6 import on another R3 export.
I believe Mike Weideli wrote a super-fast programme for Bob M (not me) that can deal in seconds with datasets of several hundred thousand records. It is not as versatile as Aditlink, but may suit your needs.
edit: (I've added "hundred" to the penultimate sentence, so that it reads "several hundred thousand records")