UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one to have negative things to say about Vista RC1. Paul Thurrott had a mouth-full as well. (And, I think many of my gripes below would have been tempered a good deal had I been able to get my 'core' apps to work in Vista - in which case I would have still complained, but wouldn't be tempted to throw the entire thing out the window...)

Over the week-end I installed Vista RC1. Despite some really great stuff, and a very smooth installation process, I'm pretty much fed up with Vista at this point. Hopefully some big changes will make their way in prior to release, but I really couldn't help feeling that even after 5 years, the thing still has way too many warts and really has that 'Microsoft 1.0' feel to it. Something I really don't want from my OS, and something that is quite frustrating from an OS that's been hard-core 'in the works' for 5+ years now.

Maybe I'm just feeling let down. You see, I REALLY wanted to transition to Vista. RC1 should be stable enough, and I REALLY am a geek, and I REALLY like Microsoft's stuff in general. But easily 80% of the applications I need on a daily basis to make $$ and get things done simply didn't work with Vista. So, while it's got some incredibly eye candy, it's now a 27 GB paper-weight partition on my laptop's HD... something I'll likely delete in a few days.

Here's my list of grievances (broken in to two categories):

Stuff that sucks, and probably isn't Vista's Fault:
Virtualization no worky: Microsoft's Virtual PC has 'known compatibility issues' and won't run/install. That's a major deal breaker for me right there. I use VPC just about every day. The other pisser was that VMware Workstation 5.5 installed fine, but somehow will NOT recognize my license information. That's likely VMware's fault (based on something stupid they've done to sign/recognize keys) - or so I would think. But it's still an application I NEED on a daily basis. Problem is: good luck Googling on "VMware Workstation and Vista". You'll just get tons of hits on people wondering why Vista won't run in VMware Workstation, not the other way around.... YES, there might well be work arounds (even very do-able ones) on those two issues, but I'm not made of time, and just can't afford to lose my 'bread-and-butter' apps right off the bat like that. So, after searching a bit for solutions, I made the realization I could either GET WORK DONE, or spend the rest of my life trying to get 'giggy' with Vista. Sadly, that's just not going to happen this go-round.

Another pisser: Nero Burning ROM won't install either. I'm no hipster DJ or iPod-toting beatnik teenager dying to burn stolen media - I just need to do weekly DVD backups of my core data. Windows Media Center looks like it will let me burn a DVD, but using it makes me feel like I've traded in my computer for a web/tv/toaster appliance. It's just got all this terribly flashy/splashy (and grainy) 'fluff' everywhere... and has this totally lame 'tv' interface. (Which I guess is fine if you buy a Computer to watch TV on, but, frankly, I'd rather just buy a tv for tv...) 

Another pisser: I wasn't able to get Yahoo Unlimited to 'upgrade' in place from 1.1 to 2.0. It downloaded everything correctly, and then hung - likely having encountered some access violation that it didn't know how to deal with. Probably NOT Vista's fault... but just one more app out of the few that I tried that simply wouldn't install/work correctly. And probably an easy work-around... but this just made me wonder how many other apps might fail 'in place' upgrades without even a wimper?

Major malfunction: I got SlickRun to install, but got lazy and didn't want to set up all of my magic words... so I navigated in to my XP partition in Explorer, found my .qrs file, opened it, and tried copying and pasting from my XP setup to my Vista Setup. Worked fine, only I could NOT save the file to save my life. I made sure it wasn't write-protected, or in use (and even KILLED slick run)... but simply could NOT save a file to the SlickRun directory. I'm not sure what's up, but I really want to blame the 'pseudo-administrator' account functionality going in Vista as the culprit. (It's like I just didn't have permissions to save the file.). Major bummer. That, and I never got it to chase my cursor as it does in XP. That was just teh sux0r.

Stuff that sucks and IS Vista's Fault
UAC: One thing that seriously pisses me off, still, is User Access Control. I just HATE the way both of my screens go black for about 1.5 seconds, and then I'm greeted with a dialog making me confirm my activities. I'll say it again: the average windows user will NOT be protected by this, and it will just piss them off until they're able to figure out how to turn it off (which won't take too long).
To the average end-user, all UAC does is flash big prompts that say: "You were doing work, would you like to press YES to keep doing the work, or would you like to press NO and lose all of your changes?" And where's the protection? End users will be trained that 'part' of installing anything on Vista means pushing those 'annoying popups'... and Mal-ware creators will still be able to access Administrator creds (through the popup/UAC confirmation) to push whatever crap they want into the TCB. The ONLY protection this affords is to MS, who can say: "hey, we warned you".

More UAC: It also bugged me that while installing a few things, I got some UAC warnings telling me that unsigned drivers were being installed. The pisser was that I had no idea WHAT was attempting to install them. Well, I did have an idea, since I was installing something, but there was NO way to trace back which executable/process was trying to install the drivers. Again: Useless.

Home folders - what the hell? So, about a year or so ago I finally made my peace with the whole "My Documents" thing that MS pushed so hard. And, given that you could place your "My Documents" folder anywhere, and your system would pick it up, I found it to be a very useful abstraction. (i.e. I could stuff my "My Music" directory on to my external USB drive, and keep oodles and oodles of music without worrying about overloading my system partition, etc.).

So, imagine my surprise to learn that Vista doesn't let you set a location for your 'root' home folder ('Home' apparently is the 'metaphor' replacing the 'My Documents' nomenclature of the past). Oh you can change the location of some of the folders WITHIN your Home directory, but when you do so it's 1) confusing, 2) infuriating.

Currently, I use my E:\ drive for all of my user data, settings, documents, crud, etc. I can back it up every night, and lose my system partition and be fine... So, I wanted to set that up with Vista. Only with Vista I can't set a location for the 'home' folder the way I could for the My Documents folder in XP. But I wanted to 'move' my desktop. So, I right clicked on the Desktop folder in my Home directory, and was able to specify the location. Only, when I told Vista that I wanted to use E:\Desktop\ instead of C:\Users\Mike\Home\Desktop\ it said: "Hey, you should copy the contents of E:\Desktop\ into the \Home\Desktop\ directory and just use that - otherwise, you'll end up seeing TWO \Desktop\ folders in your Home directory".

Um... okay. Sure enough, after specifying the new location, there were two Desktop folders (named the exact same) in my Home directory. One was completely empty, the other pointed to my 'Desktop').  Sorry, but that's just stupid. And frankly, I don't want to be TIED down to keeping my data in my system partition. It's just dumb. 

Sidebar: Good hell that thing is stupid. Can I be the first to say that I'm pissed that MS wasted development cycles on that thing? It's the text-book definition of bloat-ware. That, and I had to 1) stop displaying it, 2) turn it off, 3) kill the service. Die already!!!!!!1111oneoneone
And what's the attraction here? a bunch of lame-ass slide-shows at 100x80 pixels? Or a big analog clock (on a digital desktop)? No thanks!

So, anyhow... I'm back to XP. I likely won't touch Vista for a while now, and I'm starting to sadly become pretty sure that I'll be in no big hurry to transition to it once it's fully released.

(Though, I'll be doing a review of Office 12 here in a while, and it IS the cat's meow from everything I've seen and tested ... stay posted. The big thing: it fixes all of the CRAP bugs and issues with Office 2003, which is a MAJOR WIN.)