I’ve been using Windows Vista for about a month or so now. I ended up removing Norton on day one choosing to using Avast! and Zone Alarm. I been wanting to try out the new Comodo Firewall which recently became Vista compatible, however I have heard when used with Avast has a very adverse affect on Windows startup time.

Up until the other day everything had been running fairly smoothly. I do have this occasional issue with Thunderbird and/or Firefox where I go run the application and it won’t run. Click again and either it still does nothing or I get a prompt saying it is already running. I do a CTRL+ALT+DELETE to bring up the task manager and go into Processes. Sometimes there is only one, other times there are multiple processes of Firefox and/or Thunderbird. I will try to end process and I am able to end all but one processes of Firefox and/or Thunderbird. At least with XP it would end all the processes. The only option I left with is to shut-down and restart Windows. That usually fixes that and only I have to do that may be once every couple weeks or so.

I was dealing with this issue the other morning, which my first startup after installing a rather large update when I shut down the day prior. So while I am trying to get Thunderbird to run I get a pop-up saying Windows needs to update (or had problems with) the NVIDA driver for my video card. WTF!? This system is about a month old, so I shouldn’t haven’t to update the driver again. Since I was still fighting with Thunderbird I told Windows I would do this later. I ended up rebooting again and once more Windows Vista prompted me about the video card driver. I must have clicked on the ‘Don’t Ask Me Again’ options as suddenly I found myself running 800×600 instead of my usual 1440×900. On the positive side, Thunderbird was now running and so was Firefox.

Okay, Thunderbird was working now. All I needed to do is go into control panel and simply reinstall the video card driver. I looked through the Device Manager and discovered this machine has a bunch of NVIDA adapters, but I couldn’t find the listing for the video card. I did find a couple entries with the yellow exclamation point. One of them being the Microsoft 6to4 adapter. When I tried to update the driver, Vista tells me I am running to current version, but it still has the yellow exclamation point. More on this in a bit, I did find an “Unknown Device”. So I had Windows Vista check for a driver for this “Unknown Device”. Turns out this was the driver needed for my video card and it was installed on-the-fly (no reboot needed). Once this was done I was able to readjust my resolution back to 1440×900 (again without reboot).

So back to the Microsoft 6to4 Adapter oddity. I did a search on Google for this 6to4 adapter and found out it has something to do with the new IPv6 format for IP addresses. Further searching turned up a Microsoft help article describing this error (although the error number was different, still the same error description) from back in March. Also discovered this error is common on HP machines as well. Anyway, Microsoft has a very simple resolution:

You can safely ignore this error message. This error message does not indicate a problem with the adapter. The adapter will continue to work correctly.

I suppose these are just part of those ‘quirks’ with Windows Vista. May be they will be fixed in the Service Pack 1 release (whenever that will be). Other than these minor issues, Windows Vista hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting. I have not had any issues with hardware not working and the only driver I had to install ‘from disk’ was for my cable modem. My monitor was already ‘Vista Compatible’ when I bought it back in May and the Printer/Scanner I picked up a few days prior to my XP system’s death work fine with Vista. Even bought a hard drive enclosure (turns an internal hard drive into an external via USB 2.0) and had not problems with it and Vista.