Well..

I finally got Vista back up and running on my
notebook.. my advice to anyone with an Acer Aspire: DO NOT
ATTEMPT AN INSTALL TO HARD DRIVE OF A SLACKWARE DERIVED DISTRO!
I spent three days trying to get a gui, a READABLE gui with
Vector and then with Zenwalk. It just keeps coming up 1024x768
with horrid looking fonts (the old "cookie cutter" fonts from
the 1996 Red Hat 5.2 days) and very, very slow application
launching.
I finally formatted the 120Gb hard drive and installed Vista
Basic from DVD then "upgraded" back to Premium after getting
things straightened out via phone with the Microsoft people.
That was quite a lesson in Linux experimentation.
I seems that the problem is that this laptop is too new for
the existing Linux kernel.
Anyway, it feels strange that I'd send $100 dollars to a
distro and have it uninstallable on my new machine... but
I am looking at that from a rather humorous standpoint,
like the time I paid a cab driver to take me from the
St. Luis airport downtown and hotels were full and I had
to walk back to the airport for my morning flight out
of town.

Meanwhile, I have to accept the fact that this new computer
needs Windows Vista to function properly, at least for now.