thanks for the replies, nlite seems the way to go, vlite appears to be for vista and i havent got around to buying it to break yet lol.  thanks again much appreciated

There's always vLite, but I have never touched it.

...Which is NuHi's, the author of nLite, new program to tweak vista

Hmmm... doesn't sound too good. Personally, I wouldn't read into the problems you experienced too much.

Odd that deleting a txt file would take so long. It would be pretty hard to believe that they screwed up deleting... I mean, MS would have to be pretty stupid to have it work perfectly since DOS, but somehow muck it up in Vista. I'd say it's more likely that the computer you were on was jacked up somehow. Maybe some stupid crap software the manufacturer forced on you?

I personally don't see the fascination with Media Player Classic or VLC (unless you're running some kind of media server or something). MPlayer didn't work too good for me in XP IIRC (besides not being very good anyway as far as I could tell). I'm a little surprised about GOM though, since it's so similar to The KMPlayer, which is the media player that I'm using (right this very moment in fact) on my x64 Vista machine.

Also, I don't know anything about Comodo Firewall, except that after looking a little at their website I decided not to even try their firewall a couple months ago for my XP comp. But it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a firewall that so far as I can tell doesn't advertise being Vista compatible, in fact is NOT Vista compatible.

I don't know what to say about SketchUp... seems like Google would be more on the ball.

2 BSODs? That's more than I've seen... I've only seen one, on my not-powerful-enough laptop. I attributed it to the batteries being dead. Were they both while trying to use Comodo Firewall?

Yeah, those Favorites are causing other people problems too...
Is there a way to disable the Favourite Links Bar?
Although not the solution that you might be looking for, it probably works... (I just deleted all the links in the favorites and moved on. Now I use Directory Opus...)

Sorry Ampa, not just trying to shoot you down or anything. But Vista isn't an XP service pack (as much as the internet nerds want to treat it as such), it's a different OS with lots of changes and therefor incompatibilities.

If you can swing it, I'd suggest reinstalling Vista using another disc using your GF's key. With beyond compare I've personally verified the 32 bit Business retail and 32 bit Premium retail discs are exactly identical, and exactly identical to the 32 bit Premium OEM disc up until the last KB or so at the very end of the disc (1KB out of 2.5GB ain't too bad).

Odd that deleting a txt file would take so long. It would be pretty hard to believe that they screwed up deleting... I mean, MS would have to be pretty stupid to have it work perfectly since DOS, but somehow muck it up in Vista. I'd say it's more likely that the computer you were on was jacked up somehow. Maybe some stupid crap software the manufacturer forced on you?

There were some very odd things in the beta about deleting files - I seem to remember one complaint was it took about nine mouse clicks to achieve a simple delete. I presume it is fixed in the final version but nothing would surprise me any more!

Deleting files was broken even on XP - when I use shift+del to get rid of files instead of moving to recycle bin, every once in a while I would get 3-5 of the "are you sure?" messageboxes. Of course clicking *one* of them would delete the file, so saying yes to any of the others gives weird errors about the file not being there.

Fortunately just an explorer.exe bug, the underlying OS code is just fine, so no problems with xplorer^2. I assume the long-time-to-delete problem in vizzzduh is similar.

...various dialogues that tried to persuade you not too...

HAHAHA!

Heh, that's insane

In general, I like XP, but I think that's mostly because I've had it for so long and messed around with it so much that I'm pretty familiar with it.  Despite my fiancé muttering about bit rot and installing every darn piece of crappy freeware (DC excluded, of course) and wierd Firefox extension that takes my fancy, I'm only recently starting to wonder about reformatting and reinstalling (for the first time!).

That being said, all the previews of Vista that I've seen make it look like it would irritate the heck out of me, and I think I'm going with Linux for the next computer I buy.  No idea what flavor yet, but it's going to be at least a year or two barring major catastrophe.  There's also the political and personal distaste for big closed corporate overlords, plus the fact that I can run just as many bells and whistles on a totally free distribution of Linux as I can on Vista, and the advantages start to fade.

The only thing is Word 2003--I have a serious love/hate relationship with it.  On the one hand, it makes me angry almost every day.  It has so many irritating problems!  On the other, I have figured out how to customize it to within an inch of its life, and I find it really awkward to use other programs or default settings on other machines. 

Has anyone tried the new Office?  I really don't like the way the toolbars looked in screenshots, so I haven't even given it a second look.

Well.. i remember i didnt want to switch to XP.. though finally i did, mostly because of the app support, which will happen eventually with vista. i really hope that by the time im suppossed to do the switch, id be a happy linux user
btw i did lay my hands on vista, it toook its time and reboots, although it was supposed to be installed from factory.. in the end,, i got pretty much what i already have: XP with nicer icons and "better" UI (vista bloatware)..
i really dont mind the technicall thing underneath,.. all i need to know its that it needs  at least 1gb ram.. thats enough for me t stay away from it.. now with all that activation stuff.. c`mon..

Vista    This is my personal experience.
I've been a PC user/gamer for about 25 years counting my C64 days.

World of Warcraft + Ventrilo = Vista's audio layer pegging CPU at 100%
Oblivion = Performance decrease unless Aero is turned off (one of the big selling points for vista)
EAX (creative audio standard that's been used for years) is not supported in Vista. That super fantabulous X-Fi card with 5.1 and EAX effects? Forget it. You get stereo.
The really handy "Windows has blocked some startup programs, click here to view them" window ALWAYS appears when you boot up. Can't select the programs/icons as "I know stop telling me".
UAC windows pops up when running a utility program. Requests permission to run. I like that. But why do I have to do it every single time I run my disk defragmenter? What, there's no option to flag this as a "permission granted always" program?

For an OS that's been in development for 5 years I was underwhelmed. 3 of the biggest suppliers of hardware addons to PC's didn't/don't have satisfactory drivers for Vista. Creative, ATI, Nvidia. The performance is laggy. Aero is pretty but a resource hog. Irritating popups. Absolutely no reason to upgrade from Windows XP in the foreseeable future. It's unfortunate that I did last month to try it out.

For the record my system has the following: 2gigs ram, 3.4G P4, ATI X1900XTX, X-FI, dual 10k rpm Raptors, etc.

That's my 2 cents 

I liked XP, I like Vista. Is there something wrong with me

Darwin--Yay for archaeologists faffin away!  But you get to use cool words like "morphometric".  I'm stuck with "landscape".

Anyway, back on topic.  The other thing that I am finding is that the more serious work I do, the more I find comparable (or sometimes better) apps that are open source or free, which I would image (naively?) means that the people who are interested in them will continue to make them work in XP flavor.  A lot of them are originally Linux/Unix things, anyway, so when the time comes I will probably actually find it easier to run, say, GRASS GIS on a Linux box than my current XP one.  Hopefully by that time, I will have passed through the serious procrastination stage and gone on to genuine research....    :

AnyDVD HD ($80, $30 upgrade from AnyDVD) supposedly removes HDCP. Content Protection problem solved it seems.