"Go into your Render Settings, and under the Preview tab turn the Display Engine from OpenGL to SreeD."

FYI - and update: I revcieved this advice and it changed everything for me. The program now works as it use to before Vista. 

Much of the technical conversation above is over my head. I started this thread, and just this one simple piece of advice was what I needed. 

There is one remaining inquiry: If OpenGL is a key piece of software to make the program work, how come e-Frontier did not work to assure that this was updated and compatible? It seems it would have avoided lots of issues for lots of us - and particularily people like me who are not computer professionals.