Know something the rest of us dont, do you? How bout a link?
No links, just personal experience
When I first started using Vista (legal BTW), it started off well..
Other problems set aside, here is what I faced with networked media:
The first hint of trouble came within a few days when I had to transfer some of my media files over to a Samba NAS server
A sub 1 Gig transfer first took a huge amount of time to start , then took inordinately long to get done
Adding my media repository (~5K songs which may not be small, but isnt too huge either) to the media player took ages to complete
Shifting , seeking between songs was amazingly painful
Videos were even worse, networked Videos (even SD) would often stutter, forget HD content
Mind you, all this while, my OS X mac and XP desktop were happily handling all of this over the same network and same Samba and AFP shares
Even USB external HDD transfer of media files would sometimes randomly slowdown
Apart from the nightmware I face with my media setup, other tasks within the OS started off decently well but then I started experiencing random explorer shell crashes and other freeze issue within a few weeks.
Also, the system in question was a C2D with 2GB of RAM so even though not top of the line, but not a slouch either
I still don't know what was in the innards of Vista that cause all of this, perhaps some weird DRM check that would happen each time media files were transferred?