I started a dialog in Intel's support forum and I was advised that I was not following the instructions for the upgrade properly. If you don't have management engine 8 (I didn't), you have to do a recovery BIOS upgrade, which I though was only necessary if your BIOS upgrade went wrong somehow. In any event, I performed the BIOS recovery upgrade, installed the i7 CPU, crossed my fingers and powered up the system. The system booted into Windows with the video looking a bit weird, but an upgrade to a new video driver quickly resolved that issue.
The system is now running fine - no Windows 7 reload was required. I have not done much work with the new CPU yet, but PS6 opens in about three seconds and there is almost no delay when applying a surface blur, one of the functions that seems to take the most processing power. I'm interested in seeing how Lr responds with a bunch of adjustment points. That used to bog my system pretty heavily.