Just installed Vista and so far have not had any huge problems...............................yet.

I installed the Vista Business upgrade from XP pro........ and vista decided that I could keep my XP pro and installed its self on a new partition of my HDD.

So I lucked out.

Once under control it is just like XP that looks better in the end.

Yes Vista is decent so far. It hiccups every once in a while and may throw you a loop trying to figure out that hiccup but it seems to be fine.

I bought a dell 1526 with vista home premium.  It worked fine and their were things about it I liked. 
But networking was a nightmare, it wouldn't connect with my 360 on a regular basis and I just can't run an os that uses that many resources at idle (although I did manage to whittle it down to 800 mb'ish of ram) .

I now dual boot XP pro and Ubuntu 8.10.

I only use XP for a couple of programs and use Ubuntu for everything else.
As soon as someone figures out how to use autocad 2007 or newer and I figure out sharing internet with the 360 I will only keep XP for some work related stuff.

The rest of my Ubuntu experience has been great.  Even got my mobile broadband up faster than just getting online with windows previously. 

Overall a better than windows experience for me. (ALL FLAMERS Please note that I said for me and not just better)

I have to agree with PCLOS, I ran Ubuntu for a while & it seemed a little "plain" for me.  With PC Linux I had a lot more programs to play with & it generally looked better, I am not a big fan of the Gnome desktop. But at least you are running Linux, & that is a very  good thing.

As far as Vista, our IT dept is about to hang themselves with their Blackberry charging cords out of frustration trying to get our software to work with Vista. I never thought I would prefer XP over another system.

Yeah, updates are a breeze and getting new stuff just can't be any easier.

It will take some time for You to figure out what You like more: gnome or kde. And then, deb or rpm (and unless You compile Your own packages, it's not important).

In KDE camp, there is PCLOS (rpm), Mepis (deb) - 2 of my favorite ones, some that I just don't like: Kubuntu, Sidux, Knoppix and then all the rest that I never tried enough to decide: openSuse, Mandriva and 100's of others.

Gnome based distro-hopping usually starts with Ubuntu and it's clones, like Mint (which I would use if I had to go with Gnome) and then stuff like Fedora, Arch, Parsix and yet another 100's of distros.

In any case, You can reinstall the desktop environment You like, ex. put KDE or Gnome on Debian or put KDE on Mint. Some distros do it for You and ship rebranded packages. What I have noticed, though is that rebranded piece will never be as good as the original. For example, Kubuntu hasn't been done even closely as good as Ubuntu.

Again, without trying You will never find out what You really like. If You like Ubuntu, then try Mint. If You want to try KDE, then check with PCLOS and Mepis (both are getting new releases pretty soon).