Why would you say Vista loads slow? I have it and it loads in 10 seconds. Its way faster than my other PC which is XP. But thats probably because I have 2GB ram, but 1GB of ram would also do well.
It all depends on your PC, then you would see better results with Vista.
There is one feature that I hate and that is its security, It says I need permission to view other folders when I'm an Admin. But I know how to solve that already, still its a pain having to do it over again.
Not true at all, 1GB of RAM is suicide with Vista, being it consumes so much while idle. I love it in Best Buy when they sell laptops with 1GB of RAM and seeing them struggle when just running the OS...so much lulz.
Also, any PC will have higher benchmarks with XP than Vista. If you took one PC and dual-booted XP/Vista, it would ALWAYS be faster when running XP.