Windows Vista Feb CTP Performance Problems? Try removing Windows Explorer!
This one is from the "Who thought that one up" department (or the "You must be smoking crack" department). On several machines with the February CTP build (5308) of Vista we've seen either the performance center or the problem troubleshooter come up with some helpful advice for us about what is causing slow performance in Vista:

So according to this, the reason that Microsoft Windows Vista is starting slowly is that Microsoft wrote it? The funny thing is, at least on my machines, this build of Vista actually starts pretty quickly and logs on quickly too.
I was almost thinking some developer stuck this in as a joke and if I clicked the "How can I avoid this problem?" link it would take me to the SuSe site or the Red Hat site or maybe even Gentoo or Ubuntu. But alas it didn't do that so it must just be a plain bug. Probably the exclusion list hasn't been added yet or something like that. Anyway, this could be a useful feature when it gets fully implemented. Hopefully by Beta 2 that will happen. Then it can warn us about the Adobe Acrobat "quick loader", the Apple Quicktime tray app, and other ubiquitous performance sapping garbage like that. Many non-techie users don't know that they should get rid of those types of foistware and this feature could actually help them. Hopefully the exception list will be extended to be sure that Anti-Virus and non-MS Anti-Spyware packages don't get flagged. That same home user would end up disabling their protection if it flagged it as a problem. I'm sure they'll get this one right.
For now though, it just gave me a good a laugh. LOL.