Jeff,
seems like I should start thinking seriously about changing my avatar from that boring and geeky

one to the bad-guy-with-a-black-hat one:
"Classic black felt western hat with graceful shape that will not go away. Crushable hat can withstand the rigors of any western bad guy's active life." Sounds like I picked the right hat.
Concerning Vista: I guess there's no rush switching to the facelifted Windows XP in return for you upgrading your household PC to something that dangerously resembles this:
I can't see any reason why NeoTicker should benefit anyhow from being run on Vista. Oh well, NeoTicker will benefit as you will run Vista on your new supercomputer cluster, so considering the overhead, NeoTicker should run a littlebit faster (the rest of the performance will be used for rendering your NeoTicker window with half opaque fractal raindrop reflection effect which is an absolute must for a trading software).
Michal