Just before New Year's Eve I decided to install Vista on my laptop. So far, so good. Most of the applications I use work well.
The only application I haven't managed to run, is RSS Bandit, the RSS feed reader I used on Windows Server 2003. I've installed it, and it opens up, but I can't import my opml list. It just hangs. So while I'm waiting for the RSS Bandit team to finish their Vista-friendly version, I decided to use Outlook 2007's new RSS feature.
The last thing I did before formatting my computer was to export my RSS feed list from RSS Bandit. Importing this feed list file into Outlook 2007 went fairly well, at least better than trying to import this list in IE 7. (It failed.) All the feeds got imported. Unfortunately, all the folders / categories I had in RSS Bandit disappeared, so suddenly I had all my feeds alphabetically. Not good. With 137 feeds, that gets very complex. There's no good way of creating new folders, or moving a lot of feeds to a new folder. When I opened Outlook outside my work domain, the feeds didn't update at all, even though I was connected to the internet. When I opened Outlook while inside my work domain, the whole application chocked while trying to update these feeds.
So I removed my subscriptions through the account settings pane, but that didn't remove the content. I found an article on Michael Affronti's blog, "RSS & AutoArchive in Outlook 2007 – part 2", where he describes how to auto archive the rss feed contents to a local archive mailbox. This at least decreases my Exchange mailbox, and made Outlook (and my sys admin) a bit happier. But the folders are still sitting in my "RSS Feeds" folder. I want to get rid of them, and move on. To do this, it seems I have to right click on each folder, choose Delete, then confirm that Yes, I do want to delete these. Doing it 132 times (as I've already deleted some) seems like a waste of time, but it also seems to be the only way of getting rid of them.
So now I got two things to do: Find a smarter way of deleting the rss folders, and finding an rss reader that works on Windows Vista.
Update: The RSS Bandit works on Vista, if you just do a few tricks. It seems the menues in RSS Bandit can't cope with the Aero theme. So you can install RSS Bandit, change your theme from Aero to Vista Basic, import the OPML list, update your feeds (just to see that it works), shut down RSS Bandit, change the Theme back to Aero and then try using it again. It works on my pc now. I found clues at Eric Denekamp's article My RSS reader (RSS Bandit) on Vista. To see how to change themes from Aero to Vista basic, go to How to turn off the fancy Windows Vista Aero interface.