im thinking of completely taking off vista and going to xp. why should or shouldnt I?

Vista with SP1 is stable and reliable. It has increased security features and all new features coming from MS and it's partners will be deployed on Vista. Once you get over the learning curve, the day-to-day operation of Vista is no worse than XP.
BUT: Vista has higher hardware requirements and a steep learning curve. There are still applications that are not compatible and older hardware that may never have Vista drivers.

XP with SP2 is even more stable, widely used and tested, and it has lower hardware requirements. Assuming you already know XP, you have already forgotten the learning curve from way back when. No new features will be coming from MS, et. al., but 3rd party companies will fill the gap for a long time. XP is compatible with older hardware and software.
BUT: XP goes end-of-life in less than a week. Support will continue, but it may be hard to find a new copy should you need it. Depending on your system, it may be difficult to find drivers for the hardware because if Vista was pre-installed the maker is unlikely to carry XP drivers on their website. You may just be putting off the inevitable and when you have to move up (at work, for example) you will be behind. Windows 7 is vaporware until it ships so it has no bearing on this decision.

What "capability issue" are you talking about?

Until now... I must say I've only had 1 compatibility problem with vista, and it happened with a VERY VERY VERY old printer. Then all other problems have been fixed by clickin on *Run this program in compatibility mode for: "XP (SP2)" * I have even installed some really crappy old software my mom and some friends of mine use and found no problem on it. To me vista works just great and is not the pest everyone said it would be, only thing is the big memory consumptyon but, then, I have 2GB ram so vista only gets to ticke on it a bit.

Understand. But life has to go on and you cannot expect that any old stone age device is being supported forever. And as far as programs go, the compatibility mode is already a major accomodation. I think the problem may be worse the other way around. With a recent modern PC you may be struggeling more to get drivers for XP. I think the best strategy is to stay on XP with an older PC and go with Vista with a modern PC - which usually has sufficient resources for Vista, especially RAM.

My O/S thoughts are these:
Use XP3 as my work horse.
Use Vista Ultimate (finances permitting) to play with and be short term compatible.
Learn and use Ubantu Linux or (Debian) to prepare for the future which is almost now.
Clean Install each O/S on it's own primary partition in a triple boot configuration plus have a compressed clean image backup of each partition located on a separate hard drive.
With this being said, then we could address and discuss hardware which would also be an "interesting" issue unto its' self. Just my own opinion.

Regards,
Rick P.

just few of the things really really annoy me. I will just randomly burn a video and windows will freeze it and say that its trying to hack it. Ive tried partitioning but ive been unsucessful. ive tried 2 methods, the vista partition tool and gparted.

I started a thread about the partioning issue but i recieved very little help. All people told me was to go and view tutorials. i tried the gparted one and i almost ruined my computer. But the first issue isnt really a big deal. it rarely happens

jraparrish, there are more and more goverment agencies (and big ones) that switch to Linux. I guess because of the open source. And by the way: I love Vista.

cobija, I see your thread about partitioning and I'll post over there with assistance. I still think you should post about the other issue because (1) if it annoys you, it's worth asking about and (2) I have been burning videos for a long time and I'm curious to know what's happening.