From the days of XP I had been led to believe that swapping drives would not work, and thus I have never tried it, and assumed incorrectly that it was also the case with Vista and W7.
My friend, you have had a lot of wasted hours reinstalling since 2002 lol
Most drivers are non critical, video, network, to some extent even specific chipset drivers. When you swap out the the disk the OS will scan the machine on boot and find a load of different devices and for the most part will use generic drivers for the hardware it can't use or will simply ignore it. As long as that isn't for something like the disk controller you should still be able to boot in one fashion or another (often encountered is the SATA emulation mode in the BIOS - normally necessary to change back to IDE emulation to get it working when swapping to newer hardware)!
NT4 - now there was an OS that had issues with changing hardware.. and to a lesser extent 98 / millenium.