However, I’ve had the same installation running for over a year without any sort of issue that would make me consider downgrading to XP. Performance in a few games makes me tempted to dual-boot, but the effort make the slight performance boost less attractive.

All in all I’m extremely pleased with Vista (due to the pleasantness of having great hardware support and driver management, stability, etc.) and am just now looking at doing my first reinstall of the OS (I always worry when the same installation runs fine for over a year!). I still use linux, but only on a separate fileserver as Vista fills every one of my needs, and does it well.