Vista Annoyance #432

A few weeks ago, I watched Guy Kawasaki's interview of Steve Ballmer at MIX. Kawasaki gave Ballmer a hard time about Vista. It made me think of some of the problems I have had with Vista. I started thinking "well things seem better now.' Then this morning I try to log on to my home system and get an error message saying that Windows could not load my user profile. In the event viewer it says:

Windows cannot load the locally stored profile. Possible causes of this error include insufficient security rights or a corrupt local profile.

DETAIL - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Luckily I rebooted and everything was ok. Yep, rebooting is still the best way to fix most Windows problems. Things haven't changed much in the last fifteen years.

Actually I still have other problems with Vista. I still get problems caused by Windows Firewall. Vista was so unstable on my MacBook under Parallels that I replaced it with XP. In December, my Vista install was completely corrupted. After several minutes of use, its network and memory consumption would go ballistic making the system unusable. I thought at first it was a virus or malware of some sort, but I never found any evidence of either. I wound up re-installing Vista to fix the problem.

Now Vista SP1 is out. I don't know if I should be hopeful that it will be a remedy for all of my pains ... or if it will just be fuel for the fire and cause me to "upgrade" Vista to XP.