Vista Upgrade - attempts 4, success 0

I have yet to succeed in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Each time it runs through to the completing upgrade phase, gets about halfway through that bit whereupon I get stuck in a reboot cycle.

I have tried this now on three separate machines and two different installed partitions on one of them.

Two of the machines were Shuttle SN25G2 SFF boxes with Nforce 2 motherboards and the onboard nforce 2 (basically a geforce 2) video.

One of them was an Acer E360, an nforce 3 chipset box with an Nvidia 6600GT display card.

On the OS front, the Shuttles ran XP Pro SP2, fully patched; the Acer has the XP MCE that it came with, and an XP Pro SP2 install.

I'm starting to wonder if the common denominator here is Nvidia. In spite of the fact that I spent a long time with my Acer stripping off drivers and applications and repeatedly trying the upgrade I have not managed a successful upgrade. Has anybody managed to upgrade an Nforce_x_ system?

What I will say, having now lost days of my life to failed upgrades, is that the Upgrade Rollback feature of Vista is fantastic! A no messing, works every time, put it back to how you found it option that takes only a few minutes. Wonderful!

So, now I'm going to look into the recently-release Windows Easy Transfer Companion as a way to get my applications across onto Vista.

Why do I need to do that? Because Acer, like so many other manufacturers these days, provides no installation media for the applications they ship with the computer. Unless I want to shell out again for things like PowerDVD and NTI CD-Maker I need to either upgrade (been there, tried that), hack the cached installed files (also tried, and failed) or use a magic bullet (see above). I'll let you know how I get on with that one.