A a year or more go I started to ditch Microsoft as much as I could. I still have to use XP or Vista depending which laptop I'm using but for email I use Thunderbird, for browsing the web Firefox and for office work OpenOffice, saving files in Microsoft compatible form. It's much better than Word or Excel etc and free. Next step may be going to a Linux-based OS.
I've not found Vista too bad once I ditched the "glass" effect which slowed everything down terribly.