My personal experience with Vista is/was creating and setting up a wireless network in the house of a girlfriend of mine so she could use her brand new Acer laptop everywhere.
The only wifi router brands they sell over here are D-link, Encore and Linksys...so I went the Linksys way. Quite frankly, following the Linksys instructions exactly to the letter to get it installed on Vista was extremely disappointing.
My impression was that getting, pulling and obfuscating the necessary electricity lines to the most efficient location for the wireless router would be the most time-consuming and labor intensive part of this job.
However it was appalling how bad the Linksys software in combination with UAC. When it was finally installed it could not find the router automatically, whatever I did. Fortunately I never leave home without my trusty 7-year old win2000 HP laptop. Both laptops have Broadcom hardware to make the Wifi connection, it took my old laptop 3 minutes (including unpacking and booting!) to surf the internet through her connection.
Trying to manually configure network settings in Vista is a B*ll-breaking experience...hiding behind way too many mouse-clicks, each guarded by UAC. Normally, you have to do a lot to get me cursing at a computer (letting me play a racing game get's me going rather quickly
), but UAC really brings out the worst. Don't get me going about Vista's ability to keep the connection alive!
Furthermore the graphical wizardry doesn't do it for me at all. Come on, the only useful widget being more or less force-fed into the desktop is the clock. The default other stuff is useless at best and distracting at worst.