In the post below I shake an angry finger in the direction of Windows Vista. As it turns out, the problem was related to the configuration of a particular installation of Vista, and not the operating system itself.
Since that post I've purchased a couple new computers, and put Vista 64 Ultimate on both. It is really very nice. I've been struggling with memory issues while rendering 3d scenes, so I wanted to tap into the 64bit architecture. My first impulse was to instal XP64, but decided to try Vista on the first computer instead. The visual styling is very nice, my memory problems are eliminated, the UAC is a step in the right direction for security, and I haven't had any issues with drivers for my hardware.
