What is an idle OS? You're retarded. Sorry. Has to be said.
An operating system's job isn't to waste your resources. Every operating system idles. Unfortunately, while Vista idles, it likes to waste CPU cycles and cache junk in memory.
Now dont get me wrong, caching things in memory is...
This affects nearly every MS OS known to man... like back to 3.1 if I recall correctly. So yes, you're affected.
I dont keep up to date on this stuff, but isnt Windows 2000 near its End of Life for support from Microsoft?
-Feld