Well I took a crack at it again yesterday and to my amazement, I got everything working on my Media Center machine with Windows Vista Beta 2 x64-bit! It turns out that the unsigned driver problem I mentioned in ‘Take 1 and 2′ was indeed the culprit and turning off this policy right after a clean installation helped a lot. Also, the Vista 64-bit Beta driver for the Creative X-Fi actually worked, and the Windows XP 64-bit driver didn’t (due to a missing file problem during driver installation). You’d say that life was good for me yesterday…. but it wasn’t 
Sure the system is still unstable, sure you’d expect the occasional unexplicable error message here and there (even from within MCE; ouch!), sure the video driver -from ATI; also beta- keeps forgetting the settings I configured, sure the MCE interface doesn’t work in full screen mode on a TV (currently only works on a CRT/TFT monitor or a projector -which I have)(oh, and: “aaaaaaarrrrggh!!”); that’s all stuff that I would be willing to live with initially (until the next build is released) if only the new MCE User Experience was a blast… but it wasn’t. Just 10 minutes after having played around with the new interface I came to the conslusion I didn’t like it one bit!
So I put XP MCE back. Now life is good again. Oh, and I promised myself I will leave it alone at least until RC1 of Vista. Brrrrr.
Kevin Reeuwijk
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