You might wish to try vLite -
http://www.vlite.net/
It will strip Vista down and remove a lot of the fat to turn it into something approaching a useable system. No matter what the Vista apologists will tell you, it's a poor product. There's little it will do that XP won't (twice as fast), and there is almost no business case for upgrading to it. Even MS themselves have reluctantly conceded that it's a fat bastard of an OS and will be stripping down the next version of Windows to be less of a rancid compost heap.