I'm sorry if you read my post that way, but I'm no fanboy. Having installed Vista hundreds of times and worked with it on pre-installed computers hundreds of times, I think I've learned a little about the OS.
It's frozen on me twice, and both times were due to bad drivers. Often, when a machine freezes, it's usually a hardware fault or bad third-party code...not the OS. The fact that your PC frozen during games directly tells you that you had (usually) one of three problems - (1) a bad driver, (2) heat/power issues, or (3) a poorly written game. I've never heard of tales of pirates, but it looks fairly low-budget, so I won't rule 3 out. None of these three problems are related to how Vista operates - they're dependent on hardware and 3rd party software. The fact that your PC took 10 minutes to start up is probably due to vendor bloatware installed on your machine after Vista was...again, not Vista's fault.
The performances differences between Vista (which is only a few years old) and XP (which is over 8, now) are negligible; they're neck and neck. As drivers become more mature (as XP has had plenty of time to do so), Vista will pull ahead.
I have never gotten a BSOD in Vista. I've gotten them quite a bit in XP...but most of them were my HD2600's fault, and not XP's.
So, before you go blindly putting your OS as a scapegoat for your computer problems and doing no analysis whatsoever as to what exactly was going on, I suggest you take my word as not "fanboy". I've never been a fanboy, and never will be. If a company makes a good product, I'll use that product. If they make a crappy one, I won't use it. That's as simple as it gets.
All in all, the difference between DX10 and DX9 is negligible, but once you play games in DX10, you'll start to appreciate it. It simply adds some cool motion blur effects and some nice lighting and such. Try running the crysis benchmark with DX9 and then 10, and you'll see what I'm talking about. It just makes things look a little nicer.
As for Vista being slower than XP, as I said before, in general, they're neck and neck. Vista has tons of nice features (especially searches!), and also supports more than 4GB of RAM, which is really only nessesary for heavy audio and video editing, or graphical or engineering rendering.
And that is 100% my opinion (based on experience and benchmarks) and 0% "omfg vista is so 1337" (not that my previous post contained any...)