Whew. Last night was the last Vista straw for me. I’d been getting a variety of minor errors since I installed Vista (and got past the bigger issues), but nothing that would stop me from working.

Still, getting regular errors every time I view a folder full of thumbnails was annoying, as were things like a very slow CD writer.

Then last night I noticed that my daily backup hadn’t been done. Hmm. I check to make sure that Task Scheduler was running, but it wasn’t.

Or it was. One error message said it wasn’t running, but Task Scheduler itself said it was. When I tried to get a list of what was scheduled, I got an error telling me it couldn’t access that data.

What I had done before with Vista (and any time I had a problem) was type the error message into Google and eventually find a solution to the problem. This time, though, no joy. There was a total of two sites that mentioned the error I got, and neither in the correct context.

Ergo, Task Scheduler wasn’t gonna run.

And that was the last straw. I copied all my data manually to a backup drive, formatted my C: drive, thought for a moment about doing a clean Vista install (the one I had was an upgrade), decided against it, and loaded XP.

The XP disk I had was old, so after installing it had to download a lot of updates, but that was no big deal. And I had already made a list of what needed to be reinstalled (Firefox, Thunderbird, Office, Photoshop, etc.), so even that was relatively painless.

Besides, there’s a distinct pleasure to be had when you wipe out and start from scratch with a clean system. And because I was prepared, all my docs (including my mail, which I briefly lost with Vista) were exactly where they were supposed to be.

And now, for the first time in weeks, I know I can sit at my computer again and have it just work.