OK, problem solved... in a way.I calmed down, stuck pins into a couple of Gates and Balmer dolls to relieve the stress, then had a long talk with my girlfriend. The result was simple, thanks to Dell:I ordered a business laptop that has XP Pro pre-installed. Both legal (no sharing my copy) and much more stable than Vista could ever hope to be. The laptop comes with a Vista Business disk that I can use as a coaster (assuming it can manage even that). We will stay with XP for as long as we possibly can. That puts off a major decision about the OS for at least a few more years.Her cursed Vista Inspiron is being donated to a Linux guy.I am so disappointed that Windows 7 is based on Vista. Don't they ever learn?
Another function of my girlfriend's Vista machine (Dell 1501 Vista Home Premium) has died. This time, Windows Update has crashed and burned suddenly with an "unknown error" message. Now, no updates to Vista or Office can be done. I have debugged to the point where my patience is fried. So, I need some suggestions, starting with... 1. Spend the time and effort to upgrade her to XP Pro as I did with my own Dell 1501. This was nasty work and I don't really want to go through that again if I don't have to. Plus, my (retail) copy is in use on my own machine so it would be against the rules anyway. But maybe...??? 2. Find a third party application to replace the faulty Windows Update. I did this when her Uninstall function crashed and burned months ago but I have searched all over the place and have found nothing that does this. Any suggestions if people have used/heard of one? 3. Forget about the updates. We are both almost certain we'll be moving over to Apple (yucky UI but otherwise vastly superior to Vista) but that won't be financially possible ($$$$) until late summer. I especially worry about that bad bug in IE that can't be updated now. I use Firefox but she still uses IE. I guess I could force her but what a scene... How likely is it that she will be hit by something nasty? 4. Something I haven't thought about? FWIW, I did disable the virus checker, firewall, Defender in the startup. I ran two spy checkers (Search and Destroy, AdAware) that found nothing wrong.  All the Dell drivers are up to date including that nasty ATI display driver. Update still fails with "unknown error." Thanks for any help you all can come up with.       
Vista Update Fails...