Problems with vista numerous!

Actually, if you are getting stop errors - that's specifically a hardware/resource issue not a Vista problem. Chances are "they" will never fix the issues you are having on your PC.

Bruce, I am sorry you have been unable to create a succesful Vista envirionment. I don't know why you would be trying to put the blame off onto everything else that is really unrelated to your real problem.

I have 4 HP printers (2 fairly new laserjets, 1 older inkjet, and one OLD photosmart printer), and I have an HP scanner, and all are using released drivers except 1 (my really old 130 photo-printer) and HP have a completely suitable soluton for the unsupported one (use the 330 driver). I have run Adobe Reader 8 and now I am running Acrobat 8, both without issue (if you go to the Adobe site they are very clear about Vista support, they and their forums offer a lot of help - I found the solution to using adobePDF.dll in 64-bit Vista in the forums! ).

I do a lot of multimedia and digital work and REALLY appreciate the extra memory I can cleanly access using Vista 64 (XP 32 wasn't in the same ball-park and .64 wasn't even compatable). For me Vista has been a great experience and I am glad it is finally here.

I assume that your problems are not because you are inept since it seems that you have given it a good effort. (now this _is_ a guess) It is probably because you have continued to stick with a sucky Nvidia graphics card (as many have found it to be the root of their issues) or you do not have a proper chip-set .inf file for your MoBo. You certainly have my premission to fail back to XP. I am sure you will be back with Vista sometime in the next couple of years. Enjoy your PC.

Honestly, I have probably heard 5 complaints with nvidia drivers for every 3 people without issues; I understand that there are some stable and good (but not blisteringly fast) early driver releases available.

However, before I threw out the baby with the bath-water, I'd probably look at one other possible issue that is sometimes known to give flakey symptoms. AMDs are not generally known for their low-power draw. how many sata drives do you have? have you tried to come up with a good, rough idea about how much power you are actually using. you may want to considered a slightly larger psu first... maybe something on the order of 2x the number you think you might need.

a 430w thermaltake isn't exactly the king of the mountain... Nothing against thermaltake at all, I have a 750w toughpower -- hint, a psu is a _really_ cheap upgrade that you may be able to get tonight from your local compusa or bestbuy - it could do wonders (or nothing), but then at least you'd know! just a $.02 guess...

good luck

This sounds a lot like what happened to me on this build. IE hardly worked, couldn't open most programs and those that I could would hang or fail.

I'm running an AMD FX 64 on a Asus Crossfire with 2 x 1g OCZ platinums. After switching the mem sticks and reloading Home Premium, everything started working. Contacted OCZ and they had me go into the BIOS and increase the RAM voltage.

Booting up with just the bad RAM stick was a no go. Booting a 2nd time with the good RAM in slot A1 and the bad in slot A2 seemed tp shock the bad RAM into playing right. Switched the RAM sticks and have been running a stable machine with the suspect RAM in slot A1.

Just something to look into.