A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my laptop to Vista RC1. Of course, a few days later RC2 came out. Naturally, I had to upgrade once again. No point in doing all that work to be running the wrong build version. I learned the hard way that Vista does not play well in a 2003 domain. While on RC1, several services including Remote Desktop (terminal) and Windows Firewall would not work; I kept getting policy errors. This would occur after I connected to my domain. The errors disappeared for some unknown reason and everything worked fine. After upgrading to RC2, the errors were back and never went away.
Best I can tell is the group policies assigned for the NETWORK SERVICE and LOCAL SERVICE accounts by my domain are insufficient in Vista. I couldn't find any details as to what policies are required just the oh so helpful error message stating the policies were insufficient. After a few days hunting with no luck, I decided to rebuild the machine from scratch. The plus side? Upgrading will run 4-5 hours while a clean install will take less than an hour.
Luckily, having a clean system has resolved some of the issues I had with the upgraded version including the unknown device error and DAEMON Tools shenanigans. The NVIDIA display drives seem to cause a weird stutter in the TASKENG.EXE process (I didn't notice it prior to installing the drivers so I blame them). Killing the process after I login takes care of the problem. I haven't gotten a chance to put anything else on it, so I hope it stays happy.
I plan to compare the security policies on this clean build against my domain server to try and see what's wrong. I really want to verify that the laptop can be attached to a domain and still be accessed by my XBOX 360. Fast User Switching, which is required in order for Media Center Extenders (MCX) to connect, would not work in MCE 2006 if the computer was registered in a domain. Not having domain credentials makes accessing files on my file server over an MCX connection a nightmare (I never got it to work).
So far RC2 looks the same as RC1, though I only used RC1 for about 5 days. I must say I'm very upset that the 3D Fish Tank screen saver disappeared in RC2. I know it sounds trivial, but those fish looked so cool and it was like having a fish tank I didn't have to clean or smell. :)