I agree MS has gotten too big for thier britches!  I always reinstalled every 9 to 12 months just to get rid of all of the accumulated junk and problems.  I guess I will have to wait and see, but have in past been on the phone many times for activation codes.  Since I am almost deaf, that is a difficult situation for me. 

The NVidia 158.18 drivers work for me pretty well, just went to the 158.24 beta update, and the system is still very stable.  I am running a new but old bus type card, a Gigabyte NVidia 7600 256 8X AGP, which seems to be a little more stable than the PCIe.  Too many system configs, too many conflicts. 

I would have to say the Vista x64 on my system has been very stable, which surprises me, considering the past troubles with MS OS's that have had problems.  I do recommend adding a fast 4 or 8 gig usb flash drive, 160 x to 200x to bump up Vista's slow speed.  Although e-On keeps telling me to turn off Aero, since it is not compatible with Vue, noway, that is one of the reasons I like the desktop with all of my floating gadgets. 

Software compatibility has been the only major concern for me, other than that I have not had many of the problems with hardware others have encountered.  Linux, Mac, Python, or Java based progs usually will not funtion correctly within Vista so I do not run them anymore.

Another consideration is Windows Defender.  It can be a hazard to the system and other software, and so I have the service turned off and manually use it once in awhile.   MS still has some work to do on this OS.

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