I havent heard of any compatibilty problems with other companies products, perhaps its because they havent come out with updated drivers yet. This I understand, with a new OS not everything will be a plug and play situation the other companies have to catch up.It was the sameway when moving from 98 to XP. However nVidia advertised there cards as Vista Ready, or built for Vista, which is the basis of a current class action that may be filed(not by me I dont do that stuff), being a first adapter comes with inherent risks however that doesnt mean a company, in this case nVidia, can make claims and then not back them up, or take there own sweet time with it.
Microsoft delayed Vista for many reasons, one being was to give the major players a chance to catch up. I simply cant fnd any fault in MS on this one as of yet, they did there job now its the vendors time to do theirs.
As far as you saying its not great, that a matter of opinion then. Once it loads its very smooth running(save for the video driver issues), applications run very smooth and they have a pop to them, the aero glass feautre is great, it allows previews of windows that are minimized and there are lots of other things that impresses me over XP, such as gadgets and a better organizing of files.
It's a beta driver, just released yesterday and your 7900GT is on the list of products supported.
Hope this helps!
As for vista delays being because they wanted to give vendors time to catch up is laughable. According to some of what I've read, they didn't officially release Vista to the vendors for driver dev and testing until something like October of last year.
And don't let M$ off the hook here either. I'm sure vista is buggy as hell. You did know that YOU PAY M$$$ to beta test their products, didn't you? One can't really say that an M$ O$ is an official production release until SP1. And I'm sure there are issues with DRM (esp. for video) along with their change in driver arch to cause headaches and problems.
Did you overwrite XP? Should have installed into another partition and dual booted.
Are you a gamer? Is that why the high end video? You might find that some of your games have issues with vista as well.
You should have stuck with a known quantity. The days of rushing out to get the latest and greatest coming out of redmond is over. And I suspect that's one of the reasons why they pulled XP from retail shelves, and forbade vendors from offering XP on new systems. Because they could let the public have a tried and true fall back position when all these problems came to light.
Caveat Emptor