"My initial assumption, which turned out to be correct, is that maybe Vista just sucks."
then you state
"User Error? Safety Conscious OS defaults? Switch happy application install? I don't know."
Wow, it amazes me that "programmers" today blame things on software yet they have no idea what they are blaming the software for. What happened to the days when the programmer actually understood what they were doing and the operating systems they were working on????