Moving to a new machine can be like moving from a house you've lived in a long time...you just take things for granted after a while that you have set up.

I got a new machine with Vista on it and decided to just start all over again installing only those things I really USE. Along the way, I had to search some resources to help me do a better job installing tools I have to have to do my job. So here's a list of some quick tips that have gotten me (mostly) up to speed on the new OS. Some are tool-related and some are just Vista oddities I had to learn. This all assumes UAC is turned on (if you like pain and suffering).

1. NAnt - nothing too different here, except be sure to run your command-line as an administrator. Here's the standard way of installing NAnt and here's how to always run your command-line as an administrator.
2. Subversion - want to just type 'svn' from the command-line? The best installer I have found is CollabNet's. I used other installers but this installs Apache and sets up repository directory for you too, doing some of the steps here, including installing Subversion as a service for you. Nice. After you have installed it, you'll want to go into the firewall and open up the tcp port (3690 default) and also go into the admin MMC services list and start the service. Once done, you should be able to run 'svn' from the command line.
3. VisualSVN - This is more of an VS 2008 issue, but be sure you are current on VisualSVN's latest version, per this post.
4. Total Commander - Windows explorer still sucks and Total Cmd works on Vista.
5. NVIDIA driver - Have an NVidia card and the driver sucks (computer won't sleep, etc.)? There are tips here to improve Vista performance, including using a modified driver .inf to fix the lame laptop drivers for these cards. The site to get them has been down so you can try here to get the .zip. I installed 163.75 and my computer sleeps now. Also ,this seemed to fix sluggish wireless keyboard action I was having.
6. TortoiseSVN - works fine on Vista, though I read about some problems in the past. I haven't had any issues yet.
7. Unlocker - installed just fine and works.
8. IIS 7- Really nice and the UI is sweet. Just be sure to enable Windows Authentication on your site if you are debugging from  VS.
9. Notepad++ - The replacement for notepad.exe on the site works in Vista, but you'll need to run as administrator in all the usual places.

These are the primary tools I am using through the day that took a little work and investigation to get back to where I like things.

Vista hasn't been as lame or difficult as I have read so often, but it also isn't a step up either I think. It's hard to tell sometimes if the shutdown hangs, sleep failures, etc. are due to Vista or driver compatibility but I can say that things don't feel as stable as they did on XP. Still I haven't had any showstoppers related to development so that's good.

I'll post more of these as I discover things I had to figure out.  The only real gripe has been the silent failure of services that haven't been given administrative permission explicitly. Sometimes a service you expect to run doesn't because it isn't running as administrator...DaemonTools did that to me when I was trying to mount VS 2008 install.

Hope this helps some one...