The whole reason I responded to you was because you said "Millennium/2000"
replyMillennium _was_ Windows ME, millennium edition. Windows 2000 was completely different. :)
Vista wasn't remotely a dumpster fire. I used it for almost its entire lifetime, it was totally fine.
replyYeah, Vista Ultimate had animated desktops, it was stable for what I did, used ReadyBoost SD card for increased performance and the HP Pavilion convertable pen/touch screen was awesome. Not everyone had the same experience.
replyPeople did all the XP customization with compositor 3d effects and matrix screensavers. Then they hyped up Longhorn with all the magazines and delivered the Vista dumpster fire.
replyIIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.