More Vista Woes

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Now that we can't get XP machines from our suppliers anymore, new employees have been getting Vista Business machines.  This has been problematic in so many ways that just thinking about it gives me a headache.  Here's the running list of issues:

  1. One employee's Vista laptop, Outlook 2007 works for a bit, then starts throwing off "not implemented" errors on send/receive.  Various forum posts tell me to run Microsoft Office Diagnostics, which I did (twice).  The tool found nothing wrong, but Outlook mysteriously works again (for now).
  2. Another employee can't print to the network printer.  We have two other Vista machines that can print to it with no problem.  Near as I can tell, there must be some issue with either Norton or Windows Firewall blocking port traffic.  I've disabled both - still no dice.
  3. Vista keeps switching this employee's workgroup to the default "workgroup," which makes it really difficult for her to, say, see the network.
  4. Firefox works for a bit, then crashes and refuses to boot, saying something to the effect that it's in the middle of some reinstall operation that never seems to complete.  At least the Internet community is somewhat knowledgable about this one.  Evidently, I shouldn't have committed the unpardonable sin of making Firefox 2.0.0.3 my default browser.  I'm on IE for the time being until issues can be worked out.
  5. Adobe Acrobat works fine when I click on a local PDF, but won't run through IE.  I presume this has something to do with all those security tweaks that Microsoft made to IE.
  6. BlackBerry desktop is a big bust.  I'm waiting for a compatible version and avoiding plugging the damned thing into my USB ports on my Vista machine.  I charge it in my truck.  No synching until this is worked out.
  7. Don't even ask about my iPod.  I've heard the horror stories.  All my music is backed up on my NAS server at home, but it takes at least an hour for all that music to travel over the system bus, much less a USB cable.  I'm having nightmares about Vista corrupting my iPod and forcing a reload of all my tunes, videos, games and podcasts.

The first three are business-critical issues, and they need to be solved right away.  The remainder can be dealt with until software developers finish working out any outstanding compatibility issues.