Something to understand about Vista that most people don't realize. Many things run as a "Service" in both Server 2008 and Vista. Things that run as a "service" are supposed to be "ON" all of the time.
In the past operating systems like XP and 2000 started services, but if something closed them, they don't restart themselves until you reset the computer. To be more "consistent" there was a change to the way these "services" are run. If they aren't running and are set to startup automatically (instead of manually) the OS assumes that correctly they should be restarted if they are flagged as automatic.
This will cause the CPU to waste time trying to restart these if they are marked "automatic start". This can cause the race conditions. In XP the default behavior is only try to restart services on a restart of the system. Windows requires some of these services to be "always on" and so they try to restart automatically.
This including the "pesky caching" service called WSEARCH, which you can see on the task manager under "SearchIndexer.exe". You can fix these issues easily by going into the services manager as set the individual service that keeps starting up as a "manual" start service under the individual properties of that service in the Services Control Panel.
The task manager can now tell you what process is connected to what service so you can track it down by process id and then going to the service task manager tab.
I find the searchIndexer.exe and the wsearch the primary reason my hard drive and CPU is getting eaten. Set thse to manual (they both will still fire up if needed).
I have a couple of HP machines and some vendors add their own services to the OS for Help and problem diagnosis. I find these poorly written too and problematic.
I don't believe this practice or restarting services if they close will be going away anytime soon even in other windows releases, so if you know this upfront you can easily fix that if you view it as a problem (which I don't). There were much more problems with services that quit unexpected and couldn't be restarted in the past under XP,2000 and other OSes. A poorly written "service" can be mistaken for problems in the OS and take down a system with the automatic services startup enabled... The system keeps trying to restart it with no luck taking up CPU time..
The problem about Drivers is they now have to be signed. Most come from 3rd parties and aren't written to specifications and some of them cause reliability issues..
The best thing in Vista is it's reliability monitor which graphs all this stuff and tells you whatss wrong so you can fix it.. It will also comeback automatically with fixes to crashing software if you submit the problem to Microsoft..
Most of the problem with the XP crowd that doesn't like Vista is really two issues.
Vista doesn't work like XP and people don't know how to diagnose problems and fix them and assume they have proper knowledge just because they think they knew how the old OS worked. A lot of tech support people think Vista and Server 2008 are just like the old XP and they should know everything already, even though there are significant changes in architecture and obviously behavior.
Killing services in vista doesn't help from the task manager doesn't help if they just start up again causing RACE conditions. Is this better, certainly it's lead to less tech calls when people have to restart these in the past. Things like autoconfig didn't work without a service running. It caused many tech support calls. Go into the service manager and set rogue stuff like that to manual start and it won't try to keep restarting these.
Services are like DAEMONs in other platforms. They are designed mostly to be on all of the time..
Most of the problem with Vista itself is not "problems" with Vista but problems with user and support staff knowledge of it versus XP.. Vista requires re-learning and some new learning. Most administrators of computers are too busy to learn about things like this or new security features which would cut down on their re-installs and cut down on their frustration and getting out the OLD XP disc..
I'd love to hear your issues it sounds like you lack some knowledge of how the new OS works because it's not business as usual.
If you had invoked the reliabillity monitor you probably could have tracked down this issue right away. I don't call it a problem, because this is some that should be happening. Services not running is a royal pain and some services are dependent on others to run and most people in the past haven't manually known how to restart them or couldn't because of dependencies.
Microsoft actually fixed this with Vista, something you are seeing as a problem that is completely minor and an experienced Vista user can usually stop in a couple of clicks..
You need to aquire more and new knowledge.. Or stay with XP.. Vista users who like Vista don't find these problems and most have learned about the changes and it's a non issue.
Get it together man you don't need XP. XP had the same 3rd party chipset problems when it came out 5 years ago, that's a minor issue that gets resolved pretty quickly because it impedes machine sales.. If the manufacturers loose sales because of it. Remember the VIA chipset problems with XP long ago?? People were hacking on XP because via didnt have it together right away.
Most people who bought Vista machines with new hardware doesn't have a problem. Who would have thought automatically restarting services would be a bad idea? It certainly cut down on many tech support calls over stalled unworking services that were dependent on another.. Auto restarting of these sounds like a great idea and most of the time in practice it is.. If you have poorly written services that are a memory hog, then it can be a bad day if you don't know what's going on or how to stop it.
Most of the people complaining are trying to "upgrade their machine" which doesn't meet Vista specs have a bad experience because Vista was not designed to upgrade your old 3-4 year old PC but work with and support a whole new generation of hardware with faster CPUs and a larger memory footprint. 3rd Party OEMs and Software houses are the worst for writing "services" because they don't track memory consumption and over all performance. Most of them feel you will only be installing their software anyway.. Right??
It's easy to blame Microsoft (lets face it a lot of people see a big target there). It's even easier to say "oh this doesnt work" and give up on something. Since the early Amiga days people have had issues with OSes it's nothing new.
I remember the days of early amiga where Amiga Fireworks mode might come up and machine crash if you had over 256K on your machine due to memory leaks. Come on people think about it we are much better off today even with Vista..
