I bought The Witcher yesterday. This game is unplayable in Vista even after the patch. Its an unmitagated crash fest. Corupted journals, menus, and random crashes to desktop abound. So vista owners don't even bother unless cdprojeckt releases a patch correcting these issues.

 Luckily My wife (bless her) finally managed to find our copy of XP pro which has been missing since we moved 2 years ago. No more Vista for me. :) I'm not far into the game yet but 0 crashes since changing to XP.

A few interesting things to note:

Vissually both Nvida Beta Vista drivers and current release approved Vista drivers are slightly prettier than the most up to date XP drivers.

Massive increse in framerate by switching to XP.

I never realized how slow Vista is to boot compared to XP.

 As to the game itself. I'm suprised at how much the dev's were able to get out of an engine as dated as Aroura is. Its quite beatiful environmetally leaps and bounds beyond NWN.  I doubt Bioware would even recognize its engine now. Production values are quite high. Voice talent ranges from good to fair I havent seen any bad yet. SO far the only negative i've seen was in the transition between the prolouge and chapter 1. Very abrubt. It made me feel as if i were playing a NWN 2 module instaed of a one off game.

 I'm not recomending it yet I 'm not far enough into it to tell how good it really is. I will say however if youve been itching to play something along the veins of Planescape Torment ot Betrayal at Krondor this might be your ticket.   

you, i think you can switch compatibility to XP on Vista. Oblivion is crashing on me, too.
i read on kotaku that the witcher has a seriously long loading time that ruins that game experience. either way with my 8400GS, I can't play anything very well

I don't see any point in using Vista, and seriously doubt if I'll ever upgrade to it.

My home machine is (still) running 2000 - and I have no complaints.

Vista is CRAP for a gamer.

Don't take my word for it, run any 3D game at the same settings on the same computer in Vista and XP and you will see a large framerate increase in XP over Vista. That my friends is the Vista tax hard at work making your computer suck more than it should.

The only game that the performance dip is worthwhile in is Crysis DX10, but even then its only minor.

PS - It doesn't matter if you play the game at DX9 in vista, its still way slower than DX9 in XP. Bioshock, World in Conflict, UT3 demo, CoD4 demo, Dark Messiah, HL2 series, Portal, TF2, etc...are the games I have tested it with personally.

Oh come on shams-after using Vista, XP feels outdated to me now that I have been using Vista for a couple of months-especially ever since I'd booted up my old computer. Despite its problems, now, I see a bright future for it. However, I can't used coolbits to tweak my Nvidia card on Vista which totally sucks.

Ok ok, vista does have one thing I love by default....

It comes with Chess!...but then again I can always download a freeware copy with probably better AI...not that I need better AI since I suck at Chess...and yet somehow I still enjoy it /sigh

Switching to XP compatibility mode did not help on the witcher. It was still an unplayable crash fest. The dev's apparently have not spent any time on optimizing it for Vista. Win 95 compatibility mode did help out when I replayed fallout and fallout 2 recently though.

This games really starting to pull me in. Very big RPG nostalgia factor. lots of fun so far. I've really missed this type of experience.

you all bash Vista now but just wait a year or two-then you'll all eat your words.
(I say this because I'm stuck with Vista and can't really go back.)

 I hear ya.  I have vista set up in a dual boot configuration so I don't have to deal with it on a regular basis.  Its much more tolerable in doses =P

There were a lot of things I liked about vista most of them visual. I hope at the end of it development cycle its as stable as xp and they trim it down to be less of a resource hog.Thats the bad thing about MS early adopter = Beta Tester.

As for the witcher the dev's just apparently dont know vista well enough yet. This is their first title after all. I've played plenty of titles that worked just as well on Vista except for a frame rate drop. Valve has it down pat HL2 Episode 2 was great on Vista.

I'm about 5 hrs into the Witcher (still on chapter 1) and its offically a lot of fun. If this keeps up its a recomended play.