It's not all Vista's fault
I baught a new laptop that came with Vista and i have had to revert back to XP. This was due to HP not supporting duplex printing on Vista (works fine on XP!) and Norton's Internet Security 2007 being stopping access to trusted web sites in a completely unpredictable fashion (it works under XP!).
While Vista has some issues I'm surprised people arn't screaming for a public sacrifice from HP. The issue with the printers was known in March and they are not planning on fixing it. Allowing people to print on two sides and save paper is not a high priority for them.
I tried (I really, really, did try) to talk to Symantec about the issues with Internet Security 2007. Beyond advising me to reinstall the product (which i did - lots of times) they had nothing to say. No error messages were written to the log files. Access was not denied to the web site - a university web mail over SSL - but the browser would not be able to find it. Turn off Internet Security and it all works.
So before you knock Vista have a look at the performance of the third parties. They are as much to blame as Microsoft.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
