Actually it's not that's not compatible with older games, it's that it's not compatible with older WEB based games, even the ones from microsoft LOL.
it's not the hardware, it's the drivers. Microsoft forced a revise of all hardware drivers and they all have to be certified now.
It's not as expensive as it could be, I got my copy of ultimate for 199. You could easily buy the upgrade version and install it right over the top of a clean system and not install the key, then turn around an upgrade vista from vista and then use your upgrade key - which shouldn't work but because of a bug it does work. I wish I had gotten that now lol.
The release version didn't do anything to my music and it wasn't an issue with vista but with napster. Napster's software is quite buggy and they haven't updated the plugin for close to six months.
The only thing vista does attempt to stop people from stealing music, which I don't do.