Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping.

My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.

I had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (and also started using Linux) and all these problems went away, and I got a lot more out of my RAM to boot.