Well, as a matter of fact you
can't use DirectSound hardware acceleration with Windows Vista, unless you have a Creative Audigy or X-Fi sound card of some kind and you have to use the Alchemy utility (which doesn't support all DirectSound games) in addition to the drivers for your sound card.
What this basically means is that there's no EAX support for games on Vista. And workaround requires the aforementioned specific conditions to be fulfilled. Otherwise you're boned.
That's because Microsoft decided to abandon DirectSound entirely, since the sound card drivers were supposedly causing a lot of crashes. Yes, that's right, programs written by sound card manufacturers were making Windows crash because DirectSound allowed them a bit too much access to kernel functions, so Microsoft decided that instead of making the driver coders fix their ****, we're gonna remove this feature altogether from Vista and onwards.
So as a consequence, all games that use DirectSound are now called "Legacy Games" by Microsoft...

Of course, drivers causing crashes kinda invokes the question, why did they WHQL sign those drivers in the first place? I thought WHQL was supposed to be Windows Hardware Quality Labs assurance for the drivers to work...
Sorry, not trying to make this thread into a flamewar about how much Vista sucks or doesn't. Just figured this information would be worth knowing for people who consider building a new gaming system with Vista as OS. If you're willing to get a Creative sound card, then you can have DirectSound, but not for all games, just for those that are supported by Alchemy. And even then there might be problems as it's essentially emulated DirectSound support. As a whole, this is actually a
good thing since it forces more developement towards OpenAL, but the way Microsoft handled the matter pissed off pretty much everyone from sound hardware manufacturers to game developers, since they kinda let this information out rather late in the developement and as kind of a footnote, so a lot of games were being made for DirectSound when they could have been using OpenAL had they known Vista was not going to have hardware DirectSound support.
Vista does have some things going for it - security
is better than on XP, and driver recovery has actually prevented a system crash on me for a while when the display driver stopped responding while playing IL-2 Sturmovik so as far as stability goes it is a bit better than XP (although the occasional driver hiccup could be because of Vista, since I never had that kind of problems with IL-2 on XP), and it does have DirectX 10 (although I think other, crossplatform API's should be developed instead) but the annoyances of DRM and lack of DirectSound support (as well as dropped features from some sound cards' drivers from Creative) are still making dual boot with XP a very viable option. Or simply using XP period. XP can be managed safely as well. Just takes a bit more effort.
Also, regarding disconnecting and connecting to network... I would probably have made shortcuts for ipconfig -release and ipconfig -renew and, if necessary, configured the router DHCP sservice to give the same IP to the MAC address of that particular NIC. That should pretty effectively cut a Windows PC out of network, non? Unless the File & Printer Sharing service uses some hidden protocol that doesn't need IP address for the PC. Don't know why Comodo would give problems with network being turned on and off, but the fact remains that ZoneAlarm's free version isn't apparently holding up in leak testing compared to Kerio and Comodo. Comodo hasn't given me any problems in a long time, and my sister hasn't complained about Kerio either, so I would vouch for either of these...
By the way, do you need 64-bit versions because 32-bit version doesn't run on 64-bit Vista, or you just don't want to run 32-bit version...?