Parapunter
Most problems that I see are caused by software & hardware vendors rather than MS itself, after all, vista was in development for five plus years - the 3rd party community are a little disingenous to come out & say they don't have compatible software, drivers etc when they've had plenty of time to patch/update theur products.
MS tend not to give too much notice on this stuff. Yes, you can get access to Beta & Release Candidate code, but they don't answer questions on it so when you hit a problem you're left waiting for the next version to see if it has gone away. In reality that means that the manufacturers get 2/10ths of naff-all time to actually test before full release.
Anyway - I thought there was supposed to be upward compatability - if it is .NET 2.0 code then it should run on Vista....pity it doesn't seem to. And the .NET 3.0 release is available for XP so they should be able to test applications on that. The fact is I've seen ordinary applications that run fine on XP yet don't seem to run on Vista- nothing to do with 5 years of advance warning at all.