My main quagmire of Vista is the hardware driver requests, even if you tell it 'Dont ask me again for this device' you can guarantee it will ask again the next time you start up.
Every time I reboot my work Vista PC it will ask me to re-install the drivers for my media cart reader... click OK, and it will do it, and claims all is OK. It can use the device, but on the next bootup it will bug me again.
Even weirder, if I remote desktop into the workstation from another computer and later log in on the physical machine again, it also claims to need to install the card reader drivers again.