I used to install betas freely and learned the hard way that I best only do that using a disposable environment.
What is your perception of the safetey of installing the Release Candidate version? Is it likely that when I go to install the final version that I will be faced with having to do ugly manual steps to get rid of it just so I can install the actual release version?
I just un-installed beta 2 from a machine I use to code on (not my main work dev PC though) fairly frequently. The uninstaller does a very good job of tidying up and only left behind the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime. I then installed the RC and everything went fine and nothing seems to have broken. Based on the beta 2 uninstaller behaviour I expect the RC should uninstall nicely when RTM time comes around .
That said, the usual caveats that apply to all pre-release software still apply here. If the machine you're thinking of installing onto is mission critical then don't take the risk, use a VM or a machine you can afford the time to rebuild instead.