Wow, that really sucks how many problems you've encountered with Vista. I now use Vista as my main OS for everything except play games. Firefox is my browser of choice, I use BLIde as my IDE for BlitzMax, and have had little or no problems that weren't quickly resolved.
I do run from an admin account with UAC disabled, which probably goes a long way to having BlitzMax syncmods and generally work well. MinGW also installed and worked with a little extra effort (detailed in the module tweaks forum I believe).
The DirectSound problem is more than likely down to a driver issue for the reasons mentioned above. I already had OpenAL installed, although I'm not sure where it came from - maybe as part of my sound drivers, or possibly a game that needed them! Of course, if a user doesn't have OpenAL installed already, it will mean another download, which as you say, is not really an option, as everything should work "out of the box", so to speak.
Hopefully it won't take too long for the drivers to become Vista compatible, so the problem shouldn't be around for too long. Just need to make sure that the end user is aware that it is more important now than ever to ensure that their drivers are up to date.
I do run from an admin account with UAC disabled, which probably goes a long way to having BlitzMax syncmods and generally work well. MinGW also installed and worked with a little extra effort (detailed in the module tweaks forum I believe).
The DirectSound problem is more than likely down to a driver issue for the reasons mentioned above. I already had OpenAL installed, although I'm not sure where it came from - maybe as part of my sound drivers, or possibly a game that needed them! Of course, if a user doesn't have OpenAL installed already, it will mean another download, which as you say, is not really an option, as everything should work "out of the box", so to speak.
Hopefully it won't take too long for the drivers to become Vista compatible, so the problem shouldn't be around for too long. Just need to make sure that the end user is aware that it is more important now than ever to ensure that their drivers are up to date.