During beta 2 Ie7 crashed often when doing anything involving video, but flash webbys seemed perfectly fine (including websites with inbuilt flash advertisements). Since then viewing www.newscientist.com crashed IE for no apparent reason, so did www.supremecommander.com  (which is a full flash website). Neither webby's crashed once in Beta 2.

Also today, I decided to defrag the HD seems i had recently upgraded to RC1, during the insane amount of time it was taking with no way of telling what it was on, i left the comp to its own devices, it subsequently went to screensaver, then to sleep. When i got back to the computer I hit the return key to wake it up, to find a black screen, and the HD whirring like it was defragging, but nothing would work, i tried listening for sounds if i hit the windows key, tried ctrl-alt-del, then every key on the keyboard (even hit the media center button on da remote to see if I could hear media center load). Gave-up and reset. Granted on Beta 2 I didn't let the comp go to sleep during a defrag, Beta 2 didn't fail on me once resuming from sleep (but it did wake up at 4:27 AM every morning).

I would expect leaving ur comp alone while de-fragging would be a normal everyday occurance which MS should have thought about.. but Vista is so far away from being an OS i would want to use everyday.

PS ive sent a message to MS if they ever read them about my experience about my first day with RC1.

Asus-SLI Deluxe, AMD x2 4400 (oc'd to 5000), x1900xtx (oc'd), 2GB Corsair XMS RAM 2-3-3-6 (4x512), 500GB Maxtor HDD w/ 32mb cache, 300GB Maxtor HDD w/ 16mb cache, Creative Audigy 4 (Daniel Driver Set), HVR-1100 Dvb-t hybrid TV card, 580W Hiper Type M PSU.

5.0 score on Vista Ultimate x64, 6040 3DMark 06' score on XP

HELLO!!! ..... it is a release canidate, of course it is going to have bugs. At lease microsoft was kind enough to offer free downloads of a "preview" operataing system. Sure the bugs may be frustrating, but hey, it is a technically a beta.