ZoneAlarm Security Suite rules! :) In their defense, large scale beta testing was impossible with MS' trouble rolling out a stable version of Vista, plus it had *not* yet been launched on a mass scale. Now that Vista is slowly rolling out, individuals such as you and I (lead adopters!) are the guinea pigs for everthing from Microsoft products to 3rd party ISV products. Just comes with the territory IMHO. Thanks for your blog! Great reading!

Inflict pain.

I think that is what "they" are thinking.

I tried office 2007, couldn't get POP3/SMTP to work right with my ISP, unistalled and went back to 2003. Still having issues, but I have a reasonable workaround.

I want a new notebook with XP, but now everything is Vista. I am afraid of the incompatibilities once I get to work and have to interact with SQL, our WIN2K network, all our printers, our ERP software, our VPN, our central antivirus, our Echange 2000 server and synchronizing offline folders, etc.

Inflict pain. I'm sure of it.

Just an fyi... Zone labs is not doing so well with XP either. It may not just be a Vista problem. I just tried to install their newest update to the ZoneAlarm Suite and it totally locked up my computer. I had to bring it up in safe mode and disable the suite. I spent about 4 hours over two days uninstalling, wiping out all traces from the registry etc and reinstalling but every time, as soon as I activated the virus scan, it locked up the computer. I finally gave up and bought a different product, which has worked fine. Being the best at finding viruses isn't much help when the product is as bad as a virus.

Here's my Vista list of things that don't work:
Firewall Software
Partition Shrink Capability in Disk Manager
3rd party CD/DVD Burning Software - How do you burn an .iso?

I tried the built-in Firewall since it now can be configured to block outbound. Believe it or not, I actually made it 3 days with it on. What a pile of dung. No prewritten rules for even the Vista components (how do you allow "help" to connect to MS?), no question dialog for outbound packets (unlike inbound packets), and virtually no way to get it to work with software installers where some temporary file needs to talk.

The 3rd party firewall that looked hopeful was Jetico's Personal Firewall v2. However, it too is in Beta (but it's a "public" beta). Being a very granular FW lover (McAfee - Good, Symantec - Bad) Jetico looks great doing stuff I'd have never dreamed a firewall could do (block code injection, raw sockets, etc). However, it required a safemode uninstall in January to get my system bootable and I haven't tried again.

Today, I added Sharepoint portal file manager view to the list. (I haven't checked this out fully yet.)

I finally took OWA / IE7 off the list when our Exchange admins finally got around to applying the hotfix.

Now if ActivIdentity would get off their butts and ship our smartcard reader software...

- Vista will be ready for use when they ship the hotfixes for SP1.

I've decided that my next computer will *not* have Vista on it. In addition to the problems being encountered by the early adopters, the addition of yet more Digital Restrictions Management to the base OS is going to see this user headed in a new direction. Most likely will be moving to a flavor of Linux, although I might take a look at what Mac has to offer.

I too have had tons of trouble with Vista. I got a new notebook with Vista on it a few weeks ago. My main motivation was to learn Vista so that I could support my clients. I work in the IT field. I had no idea that it would be this difficult for me to get just the basics down in Vista. I am dismayed to find that many applications that are supposedly Vista-compatible flat out not work, or work so poorly that they are virtually unusable. The aggravation and frustration is compounded by that vast number of changes to the basic paradigm as well as the many interfaces in Vista that offer a few possible benefits, but certainly not enough to justify the pain and loss of productivity.

This is not just me. Most of my colleagues who have tried to make the leap are frustrated and are having similar experiences.

I have worked in the IT field since about 1978. I don't claim to be the most brilliant consultant on earth, but I am generally pretty comfortable with most versions of Windows and with much of the mainstream application software. It was pretty easy to go from Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro.

If those of us working in this field are having this much trouble with Vista, how on earth will Joe Sales Manager get his job done? What was Microsoft thinking? How much market share, prestige and revenue will they lose on this one?

Ditto for all of the above with Office 2007.

My next system will be a MacBook, no question. I'm sick, sick, sick of Microsoft's increasingly less stable and more restrictive OS', and the inability of major 3rd party s/w vendors to produce reliable, enduring applications. My PCs, when 2000/XP runs out, will run Linux. Bu'bye, Microsoft.

Not commenting on Microsoft's ultimate business strategy behind changing the Office UI, but as to the usability motivations behind the changes, I highly recommend reading ">Jensen Harris' Why the UI series of posts (they're listed in reverse order, so start with part 1 at the bottom.)

Tip: if you want to try out Openoffice.org on your own system, the ThinStall folks have a free OpenOffice.org virtualized package of it, just scroll down to "ThinStalled OpenOffice 2.04"

Thank you Microsoft and all those other companies who have made the Vista release the mess it is; You have given me the push I needed to stop procrastinating over a conversion to Linux and Open Office. No more MS to deal with, no more third party suppliers lying about the readiness of their drivers etc.