I was not surprised to see that Microsoft has released a private beta of a "Performance and Reliability" patch for Vista. As described here, this patch or mini service pack is targeted at the legion of minor annoyances that plague Vista.
I was initially very impressed with Vista, but as I've used it for more than an hour here or there, I have become so frustrated with it that like the blogger in the above link, I'm all set to abandon Vista and go back to XP.
If you've been following the reviews of Vista, my complaints will be familiar. File copying just does not work, i.e. it is horribly slow, for large sets of files. Even with a minimal number of services and start up programs, it take Vista several minutes after login to be useable. Occasionally the network connection dialog will take several minutes to fully load. UAC became such an annoyance that I turned it off. And my recent pet peeve, the built in compression / unzip is also suspiciously slow.
Hopefully, the Performance and Reliability patch will fix a lot of these issues. In the meantime, at least for zip files, I would highly recommend 7-Zip, an open source compression tool that easily integrates into Windows' context menus.
To have some hard data, I tried unzipping the Python html help files with both Vista's built in utility and 7-Zip. 7-Zip finished the task in under 10 seconds, it took Vista over 2 minutes. Also, you can tell 7-Zip to run in the background, so it doesn't grab more than around 10% of CPU at a time. This is a great improvement over the built in utility, which will seemingly grab as much CPU as it can get.