I found out why Vista was ok for me.

I upgraded to Vista from XP. I didn't reformat or install a fresh a version of Vista, just upgraded.

The other day I wanted a fresh version and it ended up my computer not wanting to cooperate and I couldn't get it working for 4 days. During that time I *did* get a fresh install of Vista able to boot up like, twice. And now I realize how truely awful Vista is. It was slow, unpredictable, a LOT of things didn't run properly on it, and the sound from Media Player hurt my ears.

I'm back on XP now, after struggling to get a working operating system for those 4 days. I started to read up on the Vista drivers. Both ATI and nVidia have horrible Beta drivers. So when I upgraded I was still using my XP drivers and Vista was pretty perfect, but when I installed fresh, and used the new Vista drivers, it was awful.

So yeah, the drivers are the problem, from my experience. Damn ATI and nVidia have had years to get ready for Vista, and they said they will be, and now they can't be further from that. ATI put up some beta CCC drivers which were promptly removed because they sucked ass. An article I read about the current 7.3 Vista drivers found that the CCC software itself is at fault, but the display driver is working ok.