Nope, it's backwards compatible with XP applications.Regardless, to new computer users and to your average joe, Vista will offer a lot of improvements, I'm sure. And since this means developers will need to be targeting Vista for their applications
Dual boot ftw, so I'm getting premium edition as we speak. Hopefully it's 100% less crap than the last beta build I tried. (no my lan card isn't a 56k modem nor a wifi card, thank you very much Vista driver detection)