For those who have been extolling the virtues of Vista x64 over Windows XP x64, claiming that many SW problems are actually Windows XP x64 problems, or slightly old hardware problems, or you don't have the right driver problems; I can confidently say that you don't know what you are talking about.

My previous machine was a HP xw9400 2 socket dual core Opteron workstation with a nVidia Quado FX 1800.  Six GB of RAM, two SATA hard drives in RAID 0 configuration. The OS was Windows XP x64.

My new machine is a HP z800 quad core Xeon workstation with a nVidia Quadro FX3800. 12 GB of RAM, two 15,000 RPM SAS hard drives in RAID0.  The OS is Windows Vista Business x64 SolidWorks version is 2009 SP4.1.

Punchholder rebuild time around 64 seconds.  Faster?  Sure.  Less buggy?  No way.  If I had to guess, the speed improvements are 100% hardware related and have nothing to do with Vista.

Every buggy aspect of SW (that could possibly be hardfware/OS related) that I have checked is still there.  No discernable improvements.

Two two most obvious examples thus far:

A. Open a dozen or so drawings and tile the windows.  All the windows show bits of the same drawing until you move your mouse over them, at which point, after an indeterminate amount of time, the window will refresh.  SW2007 and all previous versions did not have this problem.  Can't speak for SW2008.  We skipped it entirely.

B. New title block functionality.  More often then not, when editing text in a title block field, the new text is obscured by the old text.  Better yet, if you do some quick clicking and tabbing and typing in the title block area, you will often lock up SolidWorks completely.

No surprise to me.  I *know* these to be SW problems, but too often I see poeple here foisting these types of issues on the shoulders of Windows XP, or hardware age, or driver versions, etc.  The blame needs to go where it belongs. SolidWorks.

Jim S.