Ok, later than many others, but finally I also installed a preview of Vista on my main PC. This time it is RC1 which means that this version should already reflect the final product, except bug fixes (it's feature complete, for sure now).

There isn't much to say about Vista except that it:

• eats memory like crazy (have less than 1 gig of RAM, and your pc will most likely crawl like XP on a 128 MB machine).
• changes tons of things how Windows works and will definitely confuse the hell out of people who are used to the "old" way of configuring and customizing Windows.
• looks pretty good, and, suprisingly, the UI seems to be faster than XP which may be a result of many things now running with hardware acceleration. The transparent stuff doesn't really affect performance in any way - very different from using transparency effects by installing WindowBlinds on XP. Running Miranda also seems to benefit from this - resizing a complex clist (modern or nicer) seems to be smoother and produces much less flickering.

Most importantly, however, Miranda works fine now. The bug with missing menu entries and icons is definitely fixed and it was NOT a bug in Miranda. The only remaining issue is with loading icon packs from old resource DLLs which are no longer supported by Vista. There is probably no way to fix it, except by abandoning old 16bit resource DLLs completely for icon packs.

I've done a quick check of my plugins (clist_nicer+, tabSRMM and loadavatars) and only found a few very minor redrawing issues which should be easily fixable. My Miranda setup is pretty basic though - I don't run many non-standard plugins, but I do have 8 protocols installed.

IEView seems to suffer from a few Internet Explorer 7 changes - things which will also happen when you install IE7 on XP.

Overall, Miranda seems to be ready for Vista, except some minor things.