I had the same idea about showing people, "see, its not hard... only takes a few minutes". lol
Installing CPU: You know, I think I have just been doing it like that for so long, its just habit. In this build there is plenty of room around all side of the heatsink, and putting that clip on was a piece of cake.
The thermal paste:
This was my first AMD since the athlon, so for a long time all my retail heatsinks have come with that sticker wax crap or that "bubble gum" kind you mentioned. So when I pulled out this AM2, I was surprised to see what looked like a metallic/ceramic particle based paste. Since all other retail wax/paste applications have been horrible in the paste, I went ahead and redid this one just to make sure. This is the second comment I got about that retail paste, which leads me to believe that it was probably is all right 🙂