I’ve just made the jump from Windows XP to Vista. I was getting asked more questions about it, and having to support applications running on it, and I really wasn’t able to answer with anything more than an assumption. On top of that, my 12 month old XP install was getting creaky, waking itself up in the middle of the night, taking way too long to boot and generally annoying me.

So far Vista has been reasonably painless, after I tweaked it a little to turn off the annoyances it’s performing nicely.

Something that drove me absolutely nuts is that although Firefox was the default browser, a number of applications (including Google Desktop and Trillian) were opening links in IE. This is a known issue for both Google Desktop and Firefox but the recommended fix didn’t work for me. What finally did fix it for me was going into Default Programs, choosing the “Set program access and computer defaults” and making sure that Internet Explorer wasn’t selected as the default browser there. Obviously there are a few levels of default, and one of them wasn’t being set properly for me.

I’m blogging this in the hope that it helps someone out, I couldn’t find this answer anywhere.