While I doubt M$oft is intentionally doing this, an awful lot of Legacy hardware will not be supported in Vista according to the Beta testers at some of the Geek sites I frequent.

And I mean some stuff that isn't all that ancient either. While my PIII (1GHtz, 512MBR) box won't run it, there are a number of boxes built much later that won’t without some upgrades.

This is where the pain is going to come in, peripherals such as the HP 7375 plotter I inherited from a friend, which does work in XP after some creative workarounds, but will not with Vista.

Or the Visioneer flatbed scanner sitting in the corner, works fine ... with 98SE, no work on XP. A lot of the older printers won’t, ETC.

One of the reasons M$soft OS tends to be bloatware is the fact that it’s got support for everything built into it. This time around they chose to drop a lot of hardware support.