Is there any MS employee in this board, can they shed some light on what OS-es do people use to develop with. Maybe it is allowed, but is it frown up to use a non-MS OS?
But really, Vista-hate? Does Vista really get in the way of you opening MS Visual Studio (which seems to be the IDE of the day there)?
http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...
The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
And I'm pretty sure they run Windows too.
There are the fanatics that insist on using vista and live search instead of google because anything else would be "helping our competitors".
There are the normal xp/vista + VS people, I would wager most people fall into this category.
Then there are the awesome crazy ones, the people who write the .net CLR and windows drivers and stuff seem to use VS, source insight or emacs.
There are also macs around, but very few. There are a lot of tablet PCs, I think msft itself is the worlds largest consumer of those things.
Don't know why you would want to use XP though, it seems pretty old and funky these days. And who really wants to check for spyware every day or two. I choose to use vista, but did a good deal of my coding in emacs, and kept ubuntu on my home machine.