One of the problems with Vista was the push for vendors to mark their machines as Vista ready at all costs, where the minimum requirements were way too low, so a lot of people ended up with their first Vista experience being an anemic one, as opposed to one with the right amount of system power.

Vista was also the first time we saw the UAC elevated privilege pop up which seemed to pop for just the simplest of reasons. Mostly because devs were putting too much of user config in the program files directory, or in the windows system directory. This made it so anytime you changed a user preference the UAC would come and ruin your day. Now we just have the devs shoving everything and anything into %AppData% instead.