A potential problem with recovery disks in general is probably about the same, or will be soon, in Vista as in WinXP. The recovery disk can only recover you to the system that was current at the time it was made, and with the steady stream of "updates" and "patches," any time you "recover" your system you will need to immediately go to the update sites and get the current patches.

Both WinXP, and from what Joe O indicates, Vista, will do a good job of reinstalling the OS without disrupting programs installed later (although backup is still recommended, and when there's a problem reinstalling programs from original disks is best).

For the paranoid, even though Vista allows only one "System Restore Backup" copy to be made from the installed Vista, once that copy is made it should be possible to do a "copy a CD" in most burner programs to duplicate (i.e. mirror) the one Vista lets you burn to make a backup backup. I can't guarantee that will work, but I've seen no indication (yet) that it shouldn't. (We might expect that they're probably working on a way to prevent it, since Microsoft is a little bit paranoid about copies too.)

John