So my DVD drive in the new laptop appeared to be dead. It didn't appear in the "Computer" list with my hard drive, I inserted known good DVDs and CDs that worked on other laptops and no go. Device Manager showed that the driver couldn't load, so I removed it and reinstalled it. No go.

 Vista was becoming less interesting on my list of things, but on the Toshiba message board I found that some people had reported dead HD DVD drives. So I called Toshiba today and they said there could be a registry problem they've seen and I'd need to recover. Since I'd only installed Firefox, this wasn't a big deal. I'd purposely held off adding other software and files until I was sure it was working ok.

So I'm going through the recovery process and the drive is working. I heard from a few other Vista users in a private email thread moving around as well. I have one person that loves Vista Ultimate and is happy with the way it works, another hates it. Not sure where I am now, but I am thinking that once recover finishes, I'll reinstall Vista Ultimate from scratch and search out drivers.