November 16th, 2007

Oops, I thought I was all done with Windows Vista gripes, but they've come back to haunt me. All yesterday, while pondering my new computer's sudden inability to launch the very software I bought it for to use, I started researching ways to wipe the hard drive clean and reload some other operating system.

Maybe XP. Or some brand of Unix?

But I found some answers online from other folks and was able to get my computer back to an operable state. But I am so totally disenchanted with Windows Vista now that I would not recommend it to anyone.

And, I want to add, I started out excited at the prospect of the upgrade: I really wanted it at the start.

Shortcuts stopped working

So this started out harmlessly enough. I tried to open my email, but clicking the link on my desktop did nothing at all. Strange, I thought, but the quick-launch button worked, so I deleted the old shortcut, and made a new one by copying the quick-launch one. Problem solved, nothing to see here, move along.

But the next day, a few more of the shortcuts on my desktop stopped working: Email program again, MS Office links, Paint Shop Pro, and a new game I bought, Gothic 3. I tried checking the properties for the non-functioning shortcuts, but the interface offered no way to change the properties that counted (i.e., where the target program was located). Would I have to re-make all the shortcuts again? If they kept becoming non-functional (like the email shortcut did) there was no point until I found the root cause of this.

And then I took a more thorough look at my system and found out that a whole bunch of my Start Menu shortcuts were broken as well! All the MS Office items, some of the games, Visual Studio, some content authoring tools. I couldn't do my work properly!

So I decided to uninstall and re-install MS Office. Maybe I could at least get those shortcuts working again.

Windows Installer is not installed properly

But Windows Installer itself was broken! It would not let me uninstall anything, instead reporting an generic non-helpful error. This included Adobe PDF viewer, MS Office, that game, Gothic, and everything else I tried.

I went looking on the Internet and found page after page of people complaining about the Windows Installer issues with Windows Vista. Hmm ... at least I wasn't alone. Here is what I found out:

Windows Installer gets corrupted somehow by Vista. There is no downloadable file to reinstall Windows Installer; one has to resort to repairing Windows from its own repair utility, or one has to wind back to a previous known good state using the System Restore.

I opted for System Restore and both problems (shortcuts and Windows installer) were solved.

Excellent. Time to play some music and kick back and enjoy.

DRM ruins everything

But (always a "but", isn't there?) the new DRM "features" of Media Player take a well-documented hit on networking performance. This is not just for the machine where Media Player is running, either. I was copying files between one of my Win2K boxes and my old Windows XP laptop (which was starting to look pretty good at this point). As soon as I turned on the music, the network slowed to about 1/4 of the speed it was going before I started playing music. It got so slow that something timed out, and only half of the files got transferred.

Time for a non-Windows music player. I downloaded a freeware music player and installed it, and though I had a tricky time getting codecs for it, I finally got it working and I could listen to music without any network impairment. Who needed Windows Media Player anyway?

The only thing I worried a bit about was changing file associations for MP3, OGG, WMA, etc. But what the heck: System Restore seemed to work just fine on Vista, so what was the worst that could happen?

Windows Update

But then, around my fourth game of MS Hearts and 1/2-way through my collection of Vivaldi MP3s, Windows Update reared its ugly head and informed me that there were some updates ready to be installed.

"Oh, okay. Do it later, please."

"But I have updates ready to be installed."

"Fine, but do it later."

"But I have updates ready to be installed."

"Later!"

"But I have updates ready to be installed."

"All right, damnit, install the updates, then ... just Leave Me Alone!"

And guess what?

  1. My shortcuts stopped working again—same ones as before.
  2. Windows Installer reported an error that I tracked down to incomplete registry entries. (Whether this was Windows Installer itself or the software it was working on, MS Office, is anybody's guess: There were two Microsoft Knowledge Base articles about it, and I couldn't figure out which one was the right one in my case.
  3. My WMV and MP3 file associations changed back.

Damnit! Time for another System Restore!

But what was the point? Windows Update was just going to jump in and pester me for updates until I relented, and then mess everything up again.

So I System Restored back to a five-day-old restore point.

"Please wait," it said, then chugged for >2 hours (I don't know how long because I went to bed after a while).

When I checked it the next day, my new media player was gone—just plain old gone—while the User Access Controls were back to the factory defaults. Some other settings I had made to the wallpaper, Windows themes, etc. were gone (which is what I had expected, but very troublesome nonetheless).

And guess who wanted control of my computer again? You guessed it: Windows Update. But this time I told it to do something I had read on the Internet: Only install the critical patches, don't add the optional stuff. Lo and behold, my system still works more or less the way it wants to.

It doesn't work the way I want it to, mind you, but I am now too afraid to change anything lest the house of cards come crashing down again.

You see, Windows Installer is still broken, but I don't have any simple way to fix it, and since all the installed software is working just fine right now, I'm going to wait until there is something available for me to download to fix it.

Summary (again)

They spent 6 years working on it, and here is a summary of my experience of it:

  1. Networking AutoTuning impaired or stopped network performance for all my computers on the network (including some Win2K and XP boxes). I had to turn AutoTuning off.

  2. Other parts of the new IPv.6 stack were not compatible with my network and brought performance down. I had to disable IPv.6.

  3. User Access Control hobbled my ability to run multiple configurations of some software.

    3a. The constant steady stream of popup boxes was tedious and workflow-impairing. (I had to confirm a file copy-and-replace operation three times, even as Administrator!)

  4. Some Desktop and Start Menu Shortcuts inexplicably stopped working.

  5. Windows Installer got corrupted—a (well) known issue with Vista, and Windows Installer is not available for download yet! I have no way to fix it except for a dump and reload of the OS.

  6. Playing music on my Vista machine slowed my network down (DRM) so much that file copying going on between two completely different machines stopped working!

  7. System Restore fixed some problems, but turned my UAC back on, so there is some software I can only run under a single configuration.

... but the UI is sexy and attractive ... they'll still probably sell a billion :-)

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