Well, what we're saying is why would you want to bother with all that when XP is tried and true. It's had all it's major bugs fixed. I suppose you could get Vista and spend time figuring out work arounds for bugs and stuff, I think given enough time and access to google a mature 9 year old could accomplish that.
I don't know what KingAustin would be referring to when he says, "There is no getting around certain errors in any Windows OS" but even you have to agree that there are some bugs in Vista that make it hard (not impossible.. simply time consuming) to use, especially if you have a lot of hardware (ie, sound card, raid card, etc).
For example, a popular package for Linux that deals with network compatibility between the Linux OS and Vista is something called Samba. While I haven't experienced this problem myself (because I don't currently run Linux) or I am even aware that this is still a current issue (for all I know this could've been resolved a year ago.. keep in mind this is only an example), I've read where Vista isn't authorizing the Samba program to allow data transfer between the Linux machine and the Vista machine. I'm not sure whether or not that's by design or a flaw on Vista's part, or because Samba hasn't been updated to communicate. There was a 30 page discussion on the issue at this other forum and they were searching like crazy to find a solution and they concluded that it's either too early and one or both parties needed to develop and debug to find out what the problem is.
It's just stuff like that that make me want to just WAIT until the first service pack to jump into a new operating system. It's pointless to deal with all those headaches when you could stick with a working operating system and get Vista when all those problem are already resolved.
I don't know what you mean when you say games minimize faster. Unless you were using bad XP drivers, this just defies common sense. Vista's interface, as you know, is obviously more graphically intense than XP. It uses a gob more RAM and takes GPU cycles. How in the world can the game minimize and give you a smoother performing UI than XP? I have to say, that's a bit of a stretch to believe.