So two days ago my copy of Vista Home Premium arrived in the mail. I had already prepared my new 500 GB drive to house both Windows and Linux previously. Much to my horror, however, I realized that the Vista that had been shipped to me was an "Upgrade" version! Since I was planning on doing a clean install on a partition with no prior version of Windows, this presented a problem. Here's what happened:

1. Tried booting off the Vista DVD anyway. After entering my key, it said I had to install from my existing Windows installation and would not allow me to continue.
2. Attempted to install an extra version of XP I had lying around, only to find that the setup program was only seeing 130 MB of the 250 MB of unpartitioned space on the drive. Discovered that the original XP could only handle drives up to 130 MB (or thereabouts), and that you needed an XP SP2 install CD to make a larger partition.
3. Found an XP SP2 install CD and installed Windows XP Pro.
4. Ran Vista setup from XP Pro, only to discover that the "upgrade" (i.e. keep programs and settings options) was disabled because you can't upgrade from XP Pro to Home Premium. If you want to keep your programs and settings from XP Pro, you had to go to either Business/Enterprise or Ultimate. It would only do a clean install. It's not like I had any programs or settings to keep, but this still made me feel even more bitter for having to go through the XP install.
5. Installed Vista. The install process caused the machine to reboot like 5 times, I kid you not. Very annoying.
6. When I finally booted into Vista for the first time, it spent like 10 minutes calculating my computer's performance. Seriously, did it have to take that long?

Only afterwards did my brother tell me I could somehow use an upgrade install DVD to do a clean Vista install without having to install XP first. Sheesh.

So, Vista was finally installed and working. So far I have found it to be:

• Slow. XP was much faster on my old main Windows box, which until recently, was a P4 3.0 GHz with 1 GB of RAM (I just barely upgraded to a Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2 GB of RAM).
• Slow. Flip 3D is kinda cool, but the framerate isn't all that great so it feels more like a waste of time than anything helpful.
• Slow. Visual C++ takes forever to perform basic tasks. More on Visual C++ problems in a bit.
• UAC = Annoying. My screen actually blacks out completely for a split second before the UAC dialog comes up. WHY??? I asked my buddy who has Ultimate, and he says his screen blacks out for a split second as well.

Things I like about Vista:

• Improved path names (without spaces, FINALLY!), such as C:\Users\Brad, C:\Users\Brad\Documents, etc. Way better than the old "C:\Documents and Settings\Brad\My Documents" which made doing anything in a command line torture.
• Window thumbnails when you hover the mouse over a button on the taskbar
• The new look of stuff is kinda cool, I have to admit

OK, so the main reason I was installing Vista in the first place was to debug my app. So, I got to installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express. I installed it, installed the service pack, then tried to run it. A box came up telling me I should run it as administrator or I'd have problems. Fine. I quit, right-clicked on the icon that I pinned in my Start Menu, then told it to run as administrator. Ran it again. Was told that I had to install the Vista Update for Visual Studio 2005 Express SP1. Did that. Installed the Platform SDK, which is required if you want to develop normal Windows apps. Made the configuration changes as per the instructions.

Now, I'm no idiot. I've installed VC++ 2005 Express numerous times, and I am competent at editing simple configuration files (read the SDK instructions above if you don't know what I'm talking about). However, even after editing the VC++ config files to enable the Win32 projects and add default Win32 libraries, my app was not compiling. I checked, re-checked, double checked, and triple checked each file. I even pulled up the versions on my XP box and they were identical (as far as I could tell). It's like the changes weren't taking effect: I couldn't start a Win32 app or DLL project, nor were my existing projects compiling because it wasn't linking against basic Win32 libraries.

Finally, I decided to just copy the edited config files off my XP box just for kicks, which had the SAME EXACT CONTENTS (I checked like 20 times). When I attempted to copy them over, I got a UAC box asking for file copy permission. What??? How come I had to grant it permission to overwrite the file but not to edit it? Weird. Anyway, after copying the edited files over from my XP box, things magically started working.

Remaining issues:

• At this point, I can still not open a VC++ Solution via double clicking a .sln file from an explorer window--nothing happens, AT ALL
• Sometimes, double-clicking on .h or .cpp files from an explorer window causes VC++ to say that the file could not be found. Serious, this is no joke.
• On XP, anytime I double-click a .h or .cpp file from an explorer window, it opens the files in an already running instance of the program (if there is one). On Vista, I get the UAC dialog asking for administrative rights everytime I do this, even though there is already a running instance.
• This is not really related to VC++, but it's a Vista issue nonetheless. I upgraded my sound card driver via Windows Update, which causes a red X to be placed over the volume control icon in the system tray. When I moused over it, it said "No sound card is present" or something like that. Device Manager reported no errors with the sound card. I rolled back the driver and things worked again. Please Windows Update, don't make me upgrade to a broken driver.

So, there you have it. I guess there are no catastrophic problems, just minor annoyances that are so simple that they shouldn't be an issue, and AREN'T an issue on XP.