Well, I finally went through the installation of Vista RC1. The installation went error free and after about 20-30 minutes, I was at the desktop. First, I went to the device manager to see what still needed drivers. The only things that needed a driver was the remote reciever for my Firefly remote and the AuzenTech XPlosion sound card.
Since I wanted some type of sound, I removed the sound card and replaced it with the Kworld ATSC 110 since I was curious about this also. I was happy to see Vista included drivers for the tuner card and it installed right away. Also, with the onboard sound turned back on, that also was installed with no hiccups.
At this point, I'm thinking..."Great! This is going so much better!!". Then I started installing some apps
The first app/driver to give me a little grief was the newer Nvidia forceware for RC1. About 80% through the installation, my screen went black and wouldn't come back. I finally hit the reset button and after a restart, I had a screen. The driver seemed to install correctly and the Nvidia control panel was functional. Hmmm...wierd.
A few other apps that wouldn't install or were problematic were Java, Snapstream's software, and Daemon Tools (the latter confused me since v3.33 installed just fine on my other PC with RC1).
There was one thing that I did get excited about. Just for S&G, I thought I'd mess with Windows Media Center. I walked through the initial setup, and guess what...my tuner card worked great in it. I'm not even talking about analog signals. It worked great with ATSC signals and I didn't even have any hardware tuner installed. Only one glitch...I couldn't use SPDIF output for audio. Only would work with analog audio
Anyways, that was my initial experience. I plan on playing around with it some more and see what else works/doesn't work. Overall, it looks like if you are using this motherboard, it should install Vista just fine and with all drivers at this point.