As I said before you did not answer the question, You were asked about the device OS.

At any rate active sync is not required, you need to install the mobile device center and you may need to install an SDK for the Monarch device depending on what you are doing.

I just set up my windows 7 machine to do this a couple of weeks ago. At first I was having an issue and I can not remember the exact steps I took to solve it but I think it was basically just a matter of installing the mobile device center. It seems like this was already installed on my Vista machine so I thought it would be on Windows 7 as well but apparently not.