Here is my roughly 5 month update and I am still with Microsoft Vista and much happier now. It turns out that the majority of my problems were not with Vista but my firewall, Zone Alarm Free (http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/zonealarm-pc-security-free-firewall.htm). The downright odd behavior with not being able to create new connections, not being able to kill hung processes, and just general system instability was all Zone Alarm. After endless Google searches (and four months) for such things as “vista unable to kill process”, “vista network stack failure”, “ and “vista network problems” I noticed that Zone Alarm was mentioned in more than one of the pages that I searched for. I finally followed a link back to the Zone Alarm forums and saw many posts that were describing problems not exactly like, but similar to my own. By this time I thought anything was worth a shot and uninstalled/restarted. When the system came back up, 95% of the problems were gone and I have been symptom free ever since. Due to the problems with not being able to kill a hung process such as Firefox or Internet Explorer I never thought that the firewall would be the problem. This goes to show you how deeply integrated a modern firewall program can be. In essence the firewall is part of the operating system and if it isn’t functioning at 100% then you will see problems. Here is one of the articles that got me on the right track (http://www.techspot.com/blog/76/zonealarm-for-windows-vista-dont-do-it/).

And there is a rundown of the original problems and the current outcome.

IE STOPS RESPONDING ALL THE TIME

In the original post I mentioned that this happened with no programs installed. I have come to realize that this was not completely true because I did have all of the basics such as antivirus and firewall loaded at the time. I will still occasionally have Internet Explorer or Firefox crash on me but this has mostly gone away with the removal of Zone Alarm. Issue closed.

WHERE IS MY UP ARROW?

I have learned to live without the up arrow for the most part but it is still annoying. I have come to like how each folder is displayed in the explorer bar and I can quickly jump up several levels. The problems stick around when there is a file dialogue displayed and you start in some very obscure part of the file structure and there is no side folder browser. This usually happens during installs where a program uses an older version of the file select API. Another problem can occur when the folder name is longer than the explorer bar width. In this case only one folder is shown and the benefit of jumping several folders at once is negated. With more Microsoft training I will eventually get used to it but I still often find myself saying, “where is that !@#$ up arrow.” Issue still open.

UNABLE TO KILL PROCESSES

As described above this was all Zone Alarm. Even more at (http://forums.zonealarm.org/zonelabs/). Issue closed.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY
After the initial install this just went away. The problem was mostly on a secondary internal hard drive that I use for backup and some applications. I went through and removed the old XP owners from the file permissions and added the new Vista users. A more detailed explanation has already been posted by me in #8 of this thread. Issue closed.

UAC

I am running UAC now but it can still be slightly annoying. It was off for several months but I turned it back on. I have learned that if I reorganize my start menu or some other task that requires hundreds of UAC acknowledgments then I will just turn it off and then back on. I also have a few regularly used programs that have to start under Administrator privileges so waiting for the extra 5 seconds it takes to display the UAC screen is the slightly annoying part. I still think it is a good idea but it should be faster. Issue still “slightly” open.

SHUTDOWN PROGRAMS

Same thing as before, Zone Alarm Free. (If you can’t tell, Zone Alarm is not ranked so highly in my book now.) Issue closed.

RAID RUNNING SLOW

I didn’t bring this up in the original article but after installing Vista the performance of my RAID controller handling my second hard drive went to you know where. When transferring data on my primary hard drive, which is SATA directly on the motherboard, I was having no problem getting 25-50 MB/sec. On the RAID card I was lucky to get 3 MB/sec. The performance was so bad that a USB 1.0 flash drive would outperform it. The card is a 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML SATA RAID 5 card with 256 MB onboard memory and a PCI Express connection. Under XP I never noticed a great difference of speed between the primary and secondary hard drives but under Vista the performance difference was scary. New drivers and a firmware flash did nothing. I eventually decided to reposition the card and remembered that I had it in a 1x PCIe slot. I moved it to one of the 16x slots (I have capability for dual video cards but only have one) and now the thing moves like it’s on rails. I’m not sure why Vista likes the 16x PCIe slot so much more than the 1x slot but it works and I am glad to have this behind me also. Issue closed.

CONCLUSION

Since that faithful day when I uninstalled Zone Alarm, the sky has turned blue (perhaps partly cloudy) the sun is shining, and the birds have been chirping in the background. My problems are now fairly run of the mill and I can’t say that I am having any more problems than under XP. I am still impressed with the boot time compared to XP and that interface is still prettier. My biggest headache was getting all of my applications converted from XP to Vista. Some made the jump just fine but others had to be completely scrapped and a new solution found. After most of the third-party problems have been isolated I will have to recommend Vista to anyone who is looking for a new computer. Zone Alarm Free is now completely forbidden on any of my computers and I may upgrade some of my other computers to Vista in the coming months.