HP
I bought an HP because they were, surprisingly, more flexible than Dell in configuration, their pre-sales staff was superior (see a recent story on Dell) and the price was better. A google search turned up nothing on the 9180. I did not find the thread on the 9150. I've been in the business over 35 years and am not naive. I know there are issues with hardware and software. I expect that businesses understand that it is in their interest to provide at least minimally decent support for their product and their support was ranked only a little below Dell in Consumer Reports. And I've had a number of great HP printers over the years.
I had not realized how truly customer hostile HP is. All it would have taken for me to feel good about my purchase was to have one reasonably technical (3rd? 4th?) level support person on the over 100 page thread who said "we're looking at the problem so many are having" and the vast majority of us would have been thrilled. Instead, we're told to reload windows from scratch ignoring that we don't have days to reload all the applications some of us have loaded etc and to perform other futile actions.
Some of us have been told by what is called 'first level support" that there is absolutely a Vista issue that HP is working with Microsoft on. We've been told that it's a known hardware problem with a fix expected soon. And we've been told that there is no generic problem.
Some of us have emails to that effect as well as emails from Pegatron before they clammed up about the problem. Which motherboards have the known Pegatron problem is something else.
So all I can say is do youselves a favor and don't buy HP products if you care about quality or support.