As for Classic View, I don't think he is talking about being able to use or type a post in IE7. I think he was talking more about files and folders/menus. I was lead to believe that the classic view of the start menu and folders was taken out, but that might not be true. For the networking also, I don't see what was so hard in XP. For me to network a computer, I plug in a LAN cable and I am done. If I want wireless, I hit enter on the network I want to join, type in a passowrd if needed, and *done*.
Here are a couple things you will notice. Vista is slower. Take two identical computers, same RAM, same processors and all that fun stuff, and XP is faster. If you aren't worried about startup speeds, and program loading speeds, you will be fine. Another thing is to get "full" advantage of Vista, you'll have to run JAWS 10 (I don't remember if you said you were or not). The streamers or banners or whatever those things are called seem to still give JAWS problems (from what I hear most blind people complaining about anyway). The one biggest thing against Vista is this. Seriously, do you want to trust a system that the manufacturer themself wouldn't upgrade to because of the problems/instabilities it comes pre-built with? If your computer is anything more than like 1.5-2 years old, and doesn't have at least 1.5 GB RAM, then trying to run it with JAWS is going to kill you. Vista's thing is that it is not compatible with a lot of hardware that wasn't built with only Vista in mind. If you were to buy a computer, preinstalled with Vista, then that computer has Vista compatible stuff. Many many many (like a high majority of users) that tried to install Vista on an XP machine had more issues than people seem to have with Beta systems, and almost everyone I know decided to "downgrade" back to XP. Microsoft actually came out at oen point to point out the hardware compatibility issues, so if it's an older machine, all I have to say is have fun.
On another note, I keep getting conflicting stories from people and websites. It's about 50/50 for what I hear. You have to keep support in mind.I kept hearing that Vista's support was going to be dropped because of all the problems it was having and they were going to extend XP's until Windows 7 is out, up and stable. If that isn't true though, unfortunately XP Home and XP Pro are supposed to be dropped this year sometime (XP Enterprise good until 2013 though).
I am not trying to start a war, and this is just me giving my opinion on Vista In my honest opinion, get a Mac and run XP in VmWare or Bootcamp for your things that can't be run in OSX.
Hope that helps a little.
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