>>I'm also in my third month of trying to get Vista to connect to my LAN where three WinXP machines have been living quite happily and having all kinds of "friendly relations" with each other.

Is this the wonderful world of User Account control by chance which I have lots of fun with at work? It causes me all sorts of hassle and I have yet to come to terms with it. An example is the ability to map drives between machines and browse the drive but then an application which uses that mapped drive to not function because the machine reports that it's not available.

Vista has created lots of new exciting ways to stop things working. One of the ones that amused me was the inability to run an Access database across a network of say three users (or any other database) with the Vista machine acting as a server until one makes a registry change which took us an age to find.