[MysticLlama]

Here is a quote that I agree with 100% in regards to Vista:

It's about time Microsoft made it hard for software companies to create buggy software on its OS. It shouldn't reintroduce the security holes that have made it easy for my industry to get away with selling defective products. (Yes, I'm a software developer.)
It's not Microsoft's problem that software companies don't work harder to make their products better. Instead of bashing Microsoft for trying to fix the problems with its product, get on the phone to your application suppliers and demand that they fix their own software.
It's amusing that Apple was applauded for switching from the incredibly insecure and buggy Mac OS 6/7 to the much more reliable and secure Unix-based Mac OS X. Yet when Microsoft tries to make it's product more reliable and secure, it's bashed.
-- Jay Rodgers

From Information Week Dec. 17/24, 2007

Even a lot of MS stuff didn't run without triggering UAC when Vista was first released (such as admin tools, etc.) but they've been updating them over time to where they are all signed properly, etc. and work flawlessly. The other vendors just need to do the same.

Same goes for hardware vendors. Apples don't have driver issues because they have closed hardware which makes it much more expensive. A video card for a Mac is 1.5-2x the price as compared to the PC version of the exact same card typically.

It's not MS's problem that hardware vendors are writing bad drivers, and that's 90+% of all crashes on Vista as well as XP (the first 12-18 months of XP were *horrid* for drivers, but most people don't recall that.)

I would have been perfectly fine with it if they had even broken twice as many apps as they did in the name of progress and run a Virtual PC with XP to run the old stuff. Just like OS X did with running OS 9 apps virtualized.