OSNews

What, precisely, do you mean by "We migrated several of our dying machines to Vista out of necessity" do you mean you installed Vista on the old machines, or bought new machines to replace the old ones, couldn't get XP (not too surprising) and found that all the old stuff wasn't written correctly?

A lot can be blamed on poor drivers, there's likely little doubt there, as they aren't mature, sadly, but if you're running on dying/unreliable hardware, well, I don't know why you'd expect any OS to run properly, but how you expressed things left room to doubt what you meant.

If you were forced to replace old machines with new ones, combined with also not being able to install a known quantity OS that everything else works with already, that's just not something you can expect to happen without fireworks, regardless, and sadly, too many Windows applications are written on various assumptions of how things are configured, often with security not being properly taken care of, etc. and that's something you need to scream at your software providers for.

Rolling out systems into a production realm without having a validation plan that's executed first is just asking for problems, regardless of the OS vendor. Going from one major (.1 or more) version release to another with BeOS wasn't perfectly smooth, either, and some things broke (not that there's been that many applications total to break) and don't even talk about Linux being immune to such hiccups when changing versions of libs, etc.