Thank you keenart, for your informative and interesting information. 

There is certainly so much going on under the Vista hood! To keep the car analogy, Vista is a bit like Formula One - seriously more complicated than your average family sedan! I believe MS will have the first service release for Vista around November, so it will be interesting to see what transpires there.

I have a 2GB USB drive for my Readyboost - I didn't have too much money left over after upgrading my system, so I grabbed a cheapy. I have since read about how important it is to have the "right" drive as it does affect performance. Will have to save up and get a good one soon.

With 4GB of RAM, I have set my virtual memory to minimum 8GB and maximum 12GB on the main C: drive and I have the other drives vurtual memory set to be managed by the system. 
This did help a lot with Vue and Poser 7, which are my two most graphics-intensive programs. 

I have it in my head that I should actually set virtual memory away from the same drive that Vista is on - ie. C: drive - and have it set up on another hard drive, say D: drive. I don't know why I think this, but I think it has something to do with more efficiency of access to the virtual memory or something... 

Of course, I could just be off with the pixies... will have to do some more research on this.