Vista headaches about to make xp reappear

Hey. before I do this I want to get a 2nd opinion..

my machine..

has 4 gigs of ram
an AMD 6400 X2 dual core 3ghz cpu
and a radeon 3850 512mb card

I bought vista 64 bit to make use of all 4 gigs of ram and to move into the new tech.

It was ok at first, and slow started to hate it.

I like the fancy look.. but..

it takes my pc anywhere from 5-10 minutes to load. I've emptied startup and nothing loads on startup but windows. If I click on anything, it takes a couple of secs or more before it opens.. its very noticeable lag. I check task manager and nothing is running out of the ordinary. Whenever updates install which is pretty frequent it takes forever for them to install, and when they do windows never loads right until I've rebooted at least 3 times. This morning 3 updates were installing.. and I waited probably a good 45 minutes and it still sat on the same screen.

I've ran virus and spyware scans and those found nothing. I don't download strange files. I'm pretty positive its not a virus/spyware problem.

On top of all that. Half the time, it doesn't recognize my dvd burner. If you put ANY disc in, whether it be dvd or cd.. it will ask to format it or tell you to insert a disc. This is pretty random but always seems to happen when I need to burn a disc.

I don't do anything on my pc except for minor web surfing, music recording, and the occasional online rpg. I'm tempted to go back to xp, unless someone can convince me otherwise.