When I installed Vista, I was a bit worried about what would not be working afterwards. RSS Bandit was the first thing that didn't work out of the box, but now I've figured out what to do and what not to do.
My laptop is a HP Compaq NW8000 from 2004. It's a good laptop. Unfortunately, some of the drivers for it isn't exactly brand spanking new. And NONE of them are updated for Vista. Fortunately, most of the XP drivers worked on Vista, and I did find some drivers on Windows Update. But there was one driver I couldn't install, and that was the sound driver.
I did get sound from the pc. Unfortunately, even when I plugged my head phones in, the sound would come out from both the head phones AND the internal speakers. Not good, when you share an office with 5 others. It seemed like a hardware issue, as you would think that the mechanical act of inserting the head phone jack into the socket should make the sound come only from the head phones. But still this hadn't occured while I was running Windows 2003 server, and as there was still sound in the head phones, so I didn't think it was a hardware issue. Others had had the same kind of problem, and had solved it by installing the latest audio drivers. The latest audio drivers for my laptop is from 2005...
Today I found the solution in the last post in this thread at techguy.org:
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/539302-speakers-headphones-working-same-time.html
I got the speaker problem solved.
I downloaded the driver from HP for WinXP. (http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...&swEnvOID=1093) I got the one called ADI Soundmax Audio Driver for Windows 2000/XP. When you install it it will unpack into a directory and try install itself. Then it will give you an error saying its not compatible with Vista. Ignore that, close the install, open controll panel and go into the device manager and slelect the audio card and update driver. Click browse my computer and select the folder that was created by the HP driver. It should find the driver and install it. After that it should work.
So I downloaded the same driver, unpacked it and then installed it through the Device manager. It didn't work before rebooting, but now I can listen to sounds in the head phones again, without sharing it with everyone else. 