Who told you that bald-faced one?!
Vista most certainly won't run XP drivers (drivers are software, by the way).
Vista completely broke backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Windows. Try installing an old Quickbooks program onto Vista. Won't happen. Peachtree? Nope.
See XP machines on your Vista network? Not likely...especially not printers.
Microsoft could have had all of the above by simply shipping XP with Vista, and giving the user the option of either dual-booting directly to XP, or running XP in a Vista virtual window.
But instead of doing the above (which would have allowed Vista developers to start coding from scratch instead of being tied to legacy code), Microsoft instead piled massive layers of new code in Server03/XP and called that amalgamation "Vista."
They should have just called it "Train Wreck."
I’m not saying Vista is Gods gift to the PC. As for drivers, I was not talking about drivers. I was referring to applications. You listed a few there that don’t work. I believe you, I had to install XP on a virtual machine to run Solidworks. I also have a few XP applications that are running just fine, and some that required me to set the “XP application” and “run as admin” to work. As for the XP computers showing up on the network, no problems there. My printer is also a network printer and it works just fine too. As I said before, most of the problems have a work around. It’s a pain, yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t need a hack for every little thing you wanted to do. I guess if that was what I was interested in I would get a Mac. Personally I like the challenge.
look, most all products made to run on win2k and xp work, hell alot of win95 products work too. xp came out 6 years ago so your software is at least 6 years old, you got your moneys worth out of it, time to up grade, sometimes the upgrade has better features. I am sure there were good programs on a tandy1000 back in the day