Richard -

When Win98 first came out, the recommendation was that you not exceed 2GB RAM, (recommended max was 1 GB) although lots of machines that were running it could take more than that. The problem is that Win98 (and most other systems) read until the RAM is full, but after that stuff has to be "paged" in and out of RAM to keep the current stuff handy. Of course part of the RAM has to be used to keep track of where the pages were and what was in them. Win98 memory paging was inefficient, so that pretty soon - with large amounts of RAM - the pagefile bookkeeping took up more of the RAM than the programs did, and the machine slowed down - sometimes drastically.

There was talk about some "improvement" later in the Win98 life cycle, but I never saw much real confirmation that it got better. (With Win98, there wouldn't be much reason for most people to need more than 1GB of RAM, and it was confirmed that "more than enough" could slow things down.)

Nearly all of the AV program builders have had some problems with Vista, and there have been some reports of very significant difficulties in isolated cases with WinXP SP3. Charges have been traded - diplomatically of course - between Microsoft and the AV people about who's responsible.

It's hard to get a real line on truth and beauty in this contest; but it's quite clear that Microsoft has far more (or more experienced) "diplomats" to defend them than some of the AV people have been able to match up to. Thus far, all that I've seen leaves it unclear what - if anything - can really be expected to work "as we should expect" with Vista or with XP SP3, although most people don't seem to have much problem with either of them, using any of the well-known AV programs or suites.

My only problem with AV is that I've got too many files to be scanned, so the weekly scheduled full scan (on the two hard drives normally connected) runs for about 7+ hours. I'm almost never off the machine for that long, so it does "inhibit my time wasting," although Norton runs quite satisfactorily in background and doesn't really slow things down too noticably while a scan is running.

Office 2007, on the other hand, automatically takes 4 to 12 times as long to do almost any operation, compared to what I've been used to in earlier Office versions - not counting the fight with the totally f***d up menu/toolbar system. (Probably just due to program bloat.) Just bringing an empty minimized Word window up to view takes 14 to 26 seconds, as a trivial example, on my WinXP machine. Four to 7 seconds was typical on the same machine for Word XP, for a Window with an 80 MB document in it - including the Norton scan of the document.

John