hey tl.... i have no ties to equis..... some of your concerns are beyond my scope.....

my current systems are dell dual cores, both amd and intel,  vista os..... meta v10, vista versions, have worked better than the comparable meta versions did on xp..... of course the machines are better..... i have esignal pro and qc pro versions....

1) vista is stable.... ms pro is stable on vista..... esignal is stable..... qc is stable.....

2)only issue noted on moving between versions was the splash screen from the russian dudes ksr dll.... i removed the dll..... 

3)no bottlenecks observed with vista.... memory is cheap, go with 4 gigs.....multi-display/ make sure your video card is  vista compatable.....

4)beyond my scope ....

4)assuming were speaking of preformance between vista and xp..... my experience has been meta v10's  vista preformance is better than  with xp..... keep in mind, my vista machines are better than my xp machines are..... so that would have a large impact.....

5) side by side comparisons seem to point meta v10 run on vista is somewhat faster than compareable meta v10 run on xp......

summing it up, there has not been 1 single observed issue or regret in moving to vista....... and upgrading from v9 to v10 was better still.......h