Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

This one’s going to be long, so grab something to drink …

About two months ago, the CompUSA near my office was a few days from closing its doors for good so some colleagues and I headed over to scope out any remaining deals. The pickings were slim at that point, but I walked out with an upgrade copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition for $80 (50% off). What the heck, I thought, we were going to start using Vista at work at some point, so why not get a head start on learning the ins and outs of the new OS? I also picked up a new ATI HD2600 Pro 256mb video card an extra gig of RAM for my PC to make sure everything would run smoothly on my older Gateway 831GM desktop PC.

To keep everything on the level, I did a clean install of Vista and then spent a few days re-installing, re-configuring, and re-copying (from the resulting Windows.Old directory) everything back to my liking. I ran into the normal issues everyone knew about in Vista (like extremely slow network copy times) but knew SP1 was just around the corner which would hopefully fix these annoyances. Unable to wait, I used the registry hack trick to grab the RC of SP1 early.

SP1 fixed a few problems, then gave me a few new ones:

• ZoneAlarm would randomly crash Vista’s tcpip.sys. I had to use the crash dump analysis tools to figure this one out because instead of blue-screening like XP, Vista would just reboot. I had to uninstall ZA and go back to the built-in Windows Firewall.
• After awaking from Sleep mode, both of my optical drives (DVD burner and DVD-ROM) would be missing. Doing some searches on the net, this seems to be a very common problem, but none of the registry hacks (like removing the Upper/LowerFilter keys) would fix it. The only remedy was to disable Sleep (one of Vista’s cooler features IMHO) and go back to the normal shutdown/boot routine.
• Every time I disconnect my iPod (connected via USB), I lose my wireless network connection. It doesn’t matter if I just unplug it, or eject it through iTunes first. I have to unplug and re-plug my USB wireless network adapter to get back on the network. The same thing happens sometimes when I unplug a USB flash drive or SD card, or CF card from the multi-card reader. Granted this could be some sort of USB controller issue in my PC, but this didn’t happen with XP!

Now recently Vista has started just freezing, and freezing solid. In XP when this would happen you could kill the explorer.exe process and start it again. But in Vista, it seems like once I get that dreaded “not responding” dialog, nothing I can do will unfreeze the system. Yesterday, I had Vista lock up four times in a row after clean reboots. It’s a disaster!

The latest problem happened tonight (which prompted this post). I was trying to dismount a TrueCrypt volume located on my 2gb Corsair Padlock USB drive and the truecrypt.exe process stopped responding. In true Vista fashion, the “end this program” option did nothing so I couldn’t get TrueCrypt to close. Then Explorer stopped responding and everything froze up again. I had no choice but to hold down the power button and hard shutdown the system like I’ve been having to do more and more recently. When the system boots again, and I log in, I can tell immediately something is wrong: there’s a “null error” dialog from Trillian on my desktop, and the JungleDisk Monitor configuration GUI opened without any settings in it. Something went wrong and I lost a large swath of configuration settings such as:

• no homepage set and all bookmarks missing in Firefox (thank god for XMarks!)
• profile gone from Thunderbird (had to restore the prefs.js file from my JungleDisk backup on Amazon AWS)
• all JungleDisk settings lost (luckily my automated backup settings were preserved)
• Trillian corruption (a .dtd file in the stixie directory was 0 bytes, but I managed to find a good backup copy)
• a corrupted UltraMon shortcut on the Start Menu
• DVD-ROM drive disappeared (even from the BIOS … this was probably a side-effect of the hard shutdown. I had to manually eject the tray to get the disc out and also switched power connectors internally to get it working again)

And that’s just what I found (and fixed) before I decided enough was enough for today. Who knows what other settings might be messed up? Ok, yes, something like this is a risk when you don’t shut down a (Windows) machine cleanly, but again, I don’t remember having problems like this with XP (at least, not recently).

I’m seriously tempted to go back to XP, but I know Vista (or at least Windows 7) is the future and I’m going to have to use it eventually. Hopefully these experiences will just make me a better troubleshooter in the future (can you tell I’m trying to put a positive spin on this?).