Once you get rid of all the vista shit and make it look and work like XP.

The biggest improvement comes from going into control panel and telling it to make itself more performance oriented. Then turning off all the graphics crap and setting it to "Classic" both in the task bar, control panel and explorer.

Turn off Windows Defender and User Account Control.

Once all that is done, it's a pretty stable environment and fast, if you have a quad core machine with 8 gb of ram running the 64 bit OS.