My thoughts exactly, I only first used Vista it on a new system last year and don't see what all the rage was about.
From what I've heard, the main problem was with the lack of device drivers right after it was released.

I tried Avira on two computers two months ago, and on one it was constantly trying to access the floppy drive, and that seems to be a known problem.

I'm not going to bother installing it on my other computers to see if it works, I'm going with NOD32.

When was the last time you read Slashdot?

Naturally since you support 100 times as many users as I do your going to experience many more problems then I would, but the only time I had a problem that couldn't be fixed without reinstalling Windows was back on Windows 98 when I installed two firewalls at the same time.

I don't think I've experienced anything like that in the last 7 years on Windows 2000 or XP.
On the other hand, after updating my Ubuntu box some time ago BackupPC stopped working, and it took few hours of digging to find out that the updated version of BackupPC needed a variable set in the configuration file, only the update didn't take care of that, and the error message was rather cryptic.

How is the average person supposed to know that a suspicious address? For all they know it could be some sort of acronym, and would the average Joe actually notice that the alleged government site doesn't have a .gov TLD?

Yes, if I was going to replace the hard drive or memory I would very much prefer it to be off rather than on standby.

I did not RTFA, I was talking about Virtumundo, not anything this guy wrote.

You're lucky, I had to make a BartPE cd with Spybot, and even after that had to manually find the latest random-character files is system32 and deleted them, and then boot back into Windows and run Spybot again to get rid of any left over registry entries.