And I posted the URL a month ago, so don't start pinin' away about how I get all the free stuff and you never get nuthin'.
It's been a mite eventful, but I'm mostly happy. Best thing I can report is that all of my most expensive software that's got product activation or somesuch other protection (Flash, Dreamweaver, Cinema4D, etc) updated just fine.
One thing Vista did demand before upgrading was that I un-install my old $5 OEM version of Nero 6, as it said that Nero installs drivers in a way that it can't make work properly. It did say that I'm free to reinstall Nero after it's over. I haven't reinstalled yet, but if it doesn't work I'll just update to a $5 copy of Nero 7 via softwareoutlet.com.
The only program that completely up-n-died is Juice, my until-now favorite podcast receiver. Turns out that Vista dispensed with the old "documents & settings" shtick and made the user-account thing a mite more sensible. And if you're a smart developer and you've writing code that asks Windows "hey, where's the directory for the current user", your app will work just fine. If you're a not-smart developer and you just hardcode directory names, you have a problem. You can tell a particular EXE to pretend to run as an earlier version of Windows, but that didn't fix it for me.
So I put all my favorite podcasts into Google Reader, which seems to work just as well and doesn't require anything installed on my machine.
Irony of ironies, the only other piece of software that up-n-died was IE7. Every time it'd launch , it would crash. I was able to run it in "no plugins" mode and I shut down most third-party plugins, and that fixed it. I don't know which plugin was giving IE7 fits, but it seems okay now.
Firefox and Thunderbird work just fine, happy happy. Only problem is that I can't seem to set the default browser to Firefox. At first, I thought CONSPIRACY, but then I found the new "what program do you want to use to view HTML and email" dialog. And it found and listed both Opera and Firefox. Problem is, it doesn't appear to be working. I set the defaults to Firefox and Thunderbird, and it pauses a while, then says the defaults are changed, but they're not.
I checked the Firefox buglist, and it appears that this new program and Firefox 2.0's "you are not the default browser" code aren't doing things the same way. And the Firefox folks are working on it, so I ain't shouting conspiracy yet. Hopefully that'll be working soon.
Only other thing that potentially upset me is that Solitaire and Minesweeper were gone! Taking a look, though, it appears that Vista Bizness doesn't install 'em by default, so a minute with the "add and remove chunks of Windows" box put up the fancy-shmancy new Vista games.
And Paint Shop Pro X and Aero aren't compatible, so every time I run PSP, the screen flashes and all the transparency disappears. Corel says that they're working on a fix, but I presume such a fix will require that I upgrate to PSP X1 (which contains exactly zero new features that interest me), so I'll just live with it until I can get a gratis copy.
Or I'll start using Fireworks for everything. Fireworks actually does about everything PSP does. I just need to get used to it.
It can't burn audio CD's properly. It decides to randomly interject clicks and pops all over the place, since they changed the audio conversion driver in 7.
Uninstalled Nero 7, installed Nero 6, works like a charm.