I have no advice for you, but I will commiserate a little about Vista.
I have Vista 64 running on a quad-core machine with 4GB of memory here at work. Because I have a Wacom tablet, Vista assumed I had a tablet PC and installed dozens of tablet PC-specific features. It's taken months to find and disable them all, and the worst harmed 3DSMax performance badly.
Grr...
It's pretty, though.