I had to remove WMP before MPC truly became the default for everything. If you try to open multiple video files, windows still uses WMP. Same thing happens if you try to open a video file that's inside a rar or zip even though i had MPC set as the default for all video in both MPC and Default...
The only thing different with Vista is the default user path, which is C:\Users\Default.
We used this same procedure at work when we made our Vista image to deploy.
I've been using two RocketRaid 2680's for a few months in Debian Lenny just fine. One thing is that SMART info isn't accessible to the OS, you have to use HighPoint's management utility to view it, unless it's been added in a newer driver revision.
I am using 10 WD 1.5 EADS with TLER.
EDIT...