well i m sorry that is doesnt work good for you, on my side i m running a core 2 6300 + 3Gb DDR2 667 dual channel (@ 533Mhz) + radeon X1600 pro and i have no problems at all, now perhaps you video drivers sux, the issue of drivers has already been posted on every forum talking about vista all arround the web, an other things with vista is that that it prefech a lot in memory at the start of the computer, it also, run defrag and so in background, so mostly when you just installed vista, first few days are the slowest of all

slower than xp? poor baby use a better comp on core 2 except or app who dont like aero ( like old mud client ), it is as fast as XP problems with UAC ? well i got it disable after 5 mins the 1st day i used vista, now if i do something stupid i ll lose data, but whatever i m a computer scientist i used to know what i do

well at 1st the new design of explorer can be a little annoying, but after few weeks it appears faster than the old one, i got vista since beta 2, now running ultimate final 64 bits, i m very stable ( 0 crash in 4 months already )