Never understood the criticism towards Vista... during that time I made a switch from Linux (to Vista). It was quite slick & fast. Afterwards, when I moved to Win7, it was not that much different at all.
I think SP1 fixed that significantly. In my current job, I had to install Vista twice, and I clearly remember that after installing SP1, performance became much better.
My own experience was basically this:
* 95 a - nearly unusable with the wrong kind of hardware (e.g. SCSI)
* 95 b - pretty solid
* 95 c - too few differences to b
* 98 - kinda meh, but usable
* 98 SE - finally fixed most of the 98 quirks
* 2000 - first time I felt Windows could be called "very stable"
* XP - pretty decent as well
* Vista - horrible mess on ~10 machines, worked ok on ~2
* 7 - second time I am actually ok with using it (just still greatly prefer Linux for work as a developer)In retrospect it is rather funny, but I did use Windows ME for that, and it never gave me the slightest trouble. (Of course, one might say, I hardly used it. True enough.)