Yeah, they blow.  I went on line with my laptop yesterday and uploaded a ton of "critical" Vista updates.  When it installed and final step was "creating a new restore point", it hosed up.  It sat there for about 20 min.  I finally had to restart and now I can't even restore to previous restore points. 

So far I haven't seen any other flaky effects.  Keeping my fingers crossed, otherwise it is rebuild time.   Micro for brains MS is the pits.

I use XP pro on my graphics machine