In re: Vista, there are bears in those woods.

A bit:

I fiddled with a few file and folder permissions (initially it had been read-only), but couldn’t get the directory listing to tell me the truth. Puzzled, i tried opening the file with Notepad, and fell headlong into some kind of parallel universe: the changed content was gone, and the file had reverted to its original content. What?!? I went back and opened it again with the original editor: my changes were there, just as i made them. I opened it with Notepad, then Wordpad: my changes were gone.

The answer to the puzzle is one of the creepiest “features” we’ve ever heard of, and proof positive that MS is utterly ignorant in matters of user expectations.