Previously, I asked Vista Beta 2 — Install it?

I just came from the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit (and before that a Vista Partner Opportunity day). They were throwing Vistas at me.

I couldn’t resist, so I installed Vista Beta 2 on Sunday morning. Ran into this:

• My wireless network (Buffalo Router / VPN here) was recognized, but Vista claimed my laptop hardware didn’t support it. Luckily I have a second, less secure (and therefore firewalled out of my home network) WAP. That worked OK, but I kept dropping the connection.
• The Netgear ProSafe VPN client didn’t work. Not surprising here. The Vista Upgrade Advisor warned me of this. That software doesn’t look like it is really supported. My guess is that this will still be an issue after Vista RTMs. I could have worked around this one (with some pain and consternation from Nathan).
• I kept getting “Broadcom ASF Failed to Initialize” errors. These dialog boxes would lock up the machine for a few seconds at a time. I tried disabling all sorts of drivers to no avail.
• When logging in, I would be stuck at the “Preparing your desktop. . .” message for 5 seconds to 5 minutes. Didn’t look into this one.
• Resume from hibernation went through the whole resume process only to present me with the Logon screen (not the lock screen . . .).
• Tried to do an automated build of the Digipede Network and came across an issue in a 3rd party (open source) tool that caused elevation dialogs (I guess 40 per build).

It is the last one that stopped me. I can fix the problem (and will have to eventually), but I just don’t have the bandwidth to work through this and the next 20 issues that come up. This morning, I restored XP SP2. Ghost rocks and I’m back to work.

I’m kind of down about it because I would like to support the Vista beta to help make it better.  Well, I can’t do it this time.
The good news is that this was just a big background task and didn’t impact anything I needed to do.