StarDock stated win 7 as minimum requirement, sad that it does not work for you guys.  StarDock seems very stiff on the minimum OS requirements but I assume they have valid technical reasons.

I remember them specifically saying many times that Win7 is minimum. Many have asked about Vista, so there may have developed an expectation through that, but I never heard any StarDock employee say that Vista was acceptable. Perhaps who you saw say that Vista would work was not a StarDock employee.

If you're going to try Vista ensure you're at least on Vista SP2 and are 100% absolutely fully patched. I've seen a lot of people which Vista that for some odd reason are stuck on SP1

This has been an ongoing source of confusion since forever, as we keep getting situations where one post says Vista and another says 7 is the minimum.

They really need to clarify it one way or another.

That is correct.

As it is not officially supported I would not expect any effort to be put into fixing it (that's what 'not supported' means, after all). It's not impossible that it would get fixed accidentally if the cause is related to some issue on a supported OS, but that's pretty unlikely.

In software development if you say a platform is not supported it means you don’t intend to test against that platform and that while your product may or may not work on that platform you will not be expending effort to fix issues found by people attempting to run it on that platform.

I think this is pretty clearly the case here and certainly requirements on Steam are clear that Vista is not a supported platform.

Vistax64 was installed on a good machine I bought awhile back. Apparently, it had been patched and problems fixed because I never had a problem and didn't have a need to replace it. Until now.

Vistas fine if you have a powerful machine with plenty of memory it will run ok. Of course if you then install another os even windows 7 you are suddenly going to realise how badly vista was crippling your machines performance.