You have to disable many things in Vista before it matches WinXP speed. I
did and now happy with speed.
I am not happy with a few issues, but speed is not one of them.

I switched to Appearance--.Classic (no Aero idiocy), turned off UAC,
Ethernet packet/ACK autotuning which instantly solves file copy problem over
the network, I knocked WinExplorer to XP-like behavior, turned off Indexing
services on all drier, off autoplay on all drives, disabled MANy services in
Services console and MSCONFIG... too many things to list.

So my speed as almost as good as WinXP.
That Vista was meant for entertainment and not business is obvious, well we
have to bear with it until Windows7....