Like Darren I've updated from to build 5472 of Windows Vista and I've also updated to the "Tech Refresh" build of office 2007. These interim builds can be "two steps forward, one step back" - 5456 was faster than the Beta 2 build (5384) but some things that had worked before were broken.

5472 is showing more speed still, some little improvements in fit and finish (polish to Icons, new screen saver, some wrong fonts fixed. The implementation of Info-cards has become Windows CardSpace , Windows Collaboration is now Windows Meeting Space ). And some of the things that broke between 5384 and 5456 are working again.

Working, then Broken then Fixed,

• Some of the labels were corrupted and they're back to normal (except for the Media player tool bar). Media player's tool bar wouldn't load before and does now
• My upgrade from 5384 supports VPNs.

Still broken...

• Drag and drop to the search and address bars in IE won't be fixed
• Drag and Drop to the command prompt won't be fixed either.
• Windows Media player doesn't link to the IE common feed list.
• The behaviour of the Nvidia screen driver in my Toshiba M3 has improved but is still a little... eccentric.
• For some reason the "Chess titans" game started locking up the machine after I had been on 5456 for while and that's still the case.
• One Note Mobile sync now works , but its configuration section still crashes the windows Mobile Sync Center.

Newly working

• All the IE7 beta3 features except the new FTP feature.
• DVD Maker no longer insists on a blank DVD to start.
• Help is more complete.
• Windows' desktop search now indexes One-Note files.
• Task manager has some new features which I'm sure weren't in Beta 2, but I'm unclear what was added when. I'm also fairly sure that the resource monitor tool is new in this build.

Newly broken

• Windows Media player tells me my SmartPhone is using a driver which is too old to sync to it. This is one of a number of annoyances in Media player.
• POWER PROFILES. You might find Vista is running slowly - the "balanced" profile doesn't seem to let the machine run at 100% CPU speed - even when on mains power.

On that last point try the following to see if you're affected. Start the Resource Monitor - either from the performance tab in Task manager, or from Reliability and Performance Console on the Start Menu. You should see something like this.

I think that in "Balanced" power plan the Maximum frequency for the CPU is never 100% - but that it should be when running on mains power. I haven't found a way to persuade this power plan to give me full CPU speed, so I've changed to High Performance.