I've been planning for a while now to do something around the time of Vista's one-year anniversary in early November, but since I've gotten a number of emails lately about this topic, I thought I'd mention the biggest part of it here: I want to reevaluate the x64 versions of Vista now and see if they're any more viable than they were a year ago. So today I wiped out my main desktop (on which I installed the 32-bit version of Vista Ultimate 32-bit in early December 2006) and installed Vista Ultimate x64.
The good news: It's actually much better. Virtually all of my hardware was recognized immediately and a surprising amount of my usual software installed flawlessly.
The bad news: Problems remain. Some are critical. Among them are...
iTunes. It actually does install and work. But none of my iPods will work at all, and iTunes displays a dialog asking for a 32-bit Windows version. UPDATE: I started getting weird error messages about CD import and burning not working, did a bit of research, and then downloaded a file called Driver_Installer_AMD64_EM64T.exe, which appears to have the proper x64 optical drive drivers that iTunes needs. Apparently, Apple borked this in the latest iTunes versions (go figure). NOTE: I cannot guarantee the safety of this file, but it is working for me and didn't trigger any malware sensors. I will keep testing, of course.
iPod UPDATE: So the phrase "none of my iPods" above is not technically correct. After installing the patch noted above and repairing iTunes, I plugged in my iPod classic and it worked. The iPhone and iPod touch continue not working, but I will test other iPods today. Perhaps all non-touch/iPhone iPods would work. That's not wonderful, but it's better than "none."
Windows Live suite. The installer refuses to install any of the applications. Apparently there is a workaround out there somewhere, and I've heard that Microsoft intends to support x64 with the final release.
IE add-ons. Specifically Flash, which has caused some WMP crashes as well, because Movielink requires it. My guess is that this should actually work. Not sure what's going on there.
There's a few more, but that's the gist of it for now. Any thoughts?