Ironically, I've witnessed the same on a friend's (I believe on opensuze) that could run on his old 800 MHz machine. It's not that Vista has all these awesome [6-year-old-appealing eyecandy] graphics, it's that the OS was obviously poorly written. Besides that, Vista is much less customizable than XP and really stinks of malware with all these primary "security" features. If someone released Vista as a Linux distro, practically NOBODY would use it, but the fact that MS has billions at its disposal is why it's reached popularity and STILL the majority prefer XP.
Yeah, plus the random crashing and compatibility problems. But then they released SP2 and problems were solved. Also, XP had more features than Windows 2000 and MUCH less nauseating graphics so the 300 MHz hangup was definetaly worth it. Although I wouldn't know as a rich friend of mine bought me the most expensive PC in stock back in 2001 that was 1.5 GHz with 384 MB RAM so it was more than enough to run XP.
Vista will be good in 1-2 years.
lol... are you shittin me? Who cares if a crashing program turns green/flashes/has a panorama effect if you drag other windows on it? It doesn't change the fact that the program CRASHED, and more of my applications crash on Vista than they do XP. Your not criticizing XP for some minor, irrelevant graphical phenomenon are you?