Having just gone through the teething process of installing W 7 64 bit, it is designed to install and run some 32 bit applications, in fact it installs them in a different portion of the OS. The right click "run as administrator" is a real key to making things work right.
No reason to downgrade to a32 bit OS,, I would be surprised if it was "forced" to installk drivers that circumvented the operating system safegaurds,, in fact I would be shocked if it came " back to haunt you " down the road