Vista is the way to go now that the service pack 1 is released for it. I do agree that most of the people have had problems with Vista but most of them are because security restrictions which are enabled by default and lack of some drivers. These security restrictions are there to protect the system.

Go for Vista but take some time to get familiar with the system and the features, After all it makes sense to go with the latest OS which Microsoft supports and all new software will perform well on the Vista platform.