Quote
Plus, the "help" person said it "hasn't been tested on SBS Essentials, and we won't help you with it." If I sign in as a standard user (no Admin privileges) it won't run.

Has it been tested on Server 2008/2008R2? SBS Essentials is nothing more than Server 2008R2 with wizards and auto configuration. I'd be surprised if it hasn't been tested with 2008R2.

Quote
The thing about AC's backup program is that it doesn't overwrite the previous backup -- it just adds it to the previous backups, and at 3GB a pop, it fills up a drive pretty fast. I frequently have to go in and manually delete a lot of old backups.

Someone posted here how to make the old backups delete automatically with a single line in the command prompt which you can then save as a batch file and set up in the task scheduler. I personally used VBScript to do it since "forfiles" wasn't around back in the days of XP.
Automatically Delete Old Backups

Quote
Seems to me that SBS Essentials is a completely different program from Small Business Server -- it really seems to run like Win 7.

That's the beauty of it. It was targeted at users who weren't ready for a full-on server, but users with Win 7 servers who wanted a little more.