And if you're running with 4 GB or more of RAM, the 64-bit version of Vista has much better driver support than XP ever did. Vista also has much better support for multi-core systems. Since most new systems are running multiple cores, you're much better off with Vista than you would be with XP.

Yes, but how many people do you know that are running programs that are multi-core aware? The extra cores won't help you if the programs as well as the OS don't recognize them.

but I thought ME was great

Oops...forgot about ME. I didn't use that version either. In fact, the only reason I went from 98 to 2000 was to recognize file sizes larger than 2Gb.