just a quick review of my VC Pro v9.
started with v8 Pro 32bit, upgraded to v9 Pro 32bit. thus far the feature set seems ok for the price. platform support is odd, 32bit only for Windoze, 64bit for MAC. my PC's are either new Win7 w/ min specs to do basic things, or some decent older 32bit XP. in any event, technology is progressing too fast, thus i am building a new box in the $2500 range to help me get by next ~5yrs or so. i plan to run VC Pro v9 in a MAC vm, should suffice for my needs and work much better than v9 in 32bit Windoze.
i've had some issues with v9, but perhaps its due to running it on a not so great PC. i dont really have anything to compare to, other than my limited use with an older version of rhino3d.