Welcoming the New Year with Carbide and Pry-bars

Picking up from where we left off...

We drove back up to the house Friday night after work; we both have new years off, so it was a good opportunity to work on the floors. We got in late and didn't want to wake the neighbors with hammering so we had dinner and went to bed (still on the hard floors).
The next morning, I continued pulling tack strips off the floor while my better half crawled over every inch of floor looking for carpet staples. That sounds pretty bad, but at least she had the right tool for the job. I was stuck with the caveman tools of two metal pry-bars. At some point, I got sick of being careful and brought the hammer into the equation. In a related note, it turns out the floors are oak. Good thing too because there were some accidents involving the sharp edge of a pry-bar and bit of less-than-precisely applied force. Due to the hardness of the oak, there wasn't much damage from the minor slips.
In the red room, the tack strips were secured by a mix of fat 3/4" nails and 1.5" ringshanks: the fat nails were pretty easy to deal with as they came out with the tack strips, but the ringshank nails had some serious holding power. When I was lucky, they pulled out with the tack strip, but more often, I had to chisel out the tack strip wood around the nail head to get any pulling leverage. In the north-west corner of the red room, there is evidence of water damage on the floor under the molding and the tack strips are rust and weakened.
In the light room, the tack strips were a mix of old and "new" with different size tacks and different quality plywood. Most of the strips were secured with staples that made removal really easy and a mix of 2" smooth nails and headless brads. Halfway around the room, she finished with the staple puller and I realized that it was the perfect tack strip tool. I gave up pulling the strips up and switched to macerating the wood around each nail with the staple puller and then pulling the nails out with a front cutting nipper: things really started zipping along after that.
By Saturday afternoon, we had the entire upstairs bare and carpet-crap free. We broke out my brand new cheapo belt sander and tried to remove some of the finish in the red room: it could've gone better. Something about the old finish just forms a gooey mess on the belt. It's related to heat, but even with a palm sander held very gently, I couldn't get it to sand for more than a few seconds before gumming up the paper. A lower grit might help, but I'm not holding my breath.
So we got out the carbide scraper! Some people are paying outrageous sums for "hand scraped" recovered floors: we'll just get them for free?!