Just got a new laptop running Windows Vista Business and while it hasn’t been as painful as I had expected (having 4gb of ram helps) I did spend all of Wednesday morning trying to resolve a problem with VMWare Server. Installation was fine but as soon as I tried to start an image the machine just died but there was obviously something going on as the hard disk light was working overtime.
A quick search (once I had regained control of my machine) showed that this is a known problem and is due to Windows trying to page out the image from memory to disk and that the way to prevent this is to force the image to remain in RAM. It certainly works.
More details here: http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/vmware-server-causes-system-frozen-hang-and-unresponsive-when-powerstart-up-in-vista/