I have heard from some that work in other agencies that similar decisions are being contemplated.  I know one place tested Xandros Linux a year or two ago, but have not heard about the results.  Office 2007's interface is so different that it is going to be a nightmare to support, and office is one of the main reasons to buy Windows right now.  (Others include AutoCAD and mapping software).  IE7 breaks most of the in-house webapps that use ActiveX, and if the apps need to be rewritten anyway, why not make them work with Firefox and Opera too, especially since those are available on other operating systems that might be considered.

Your feed is back on Google. 

This isn't me piling on Vista, enough other people with more experience can do that, but I thought it worth reporting that a coworker (contractor) just got a new high end Vista Ultimate equipped laptop and it seems to have some security "feature" that causes it to delete her profile for the Cincom domain every time she logs off. She's been battling it for two or three days, and I think they may finally have found a way around it, but it seems silly that such a problem would exist. Cincom is pretty much all MS behind the firewall.

I just expected Vista to work in this environment. Kinda like a Mac would ;)

You make it look like some surprise that Vista isn't showing up in government spaces. From my experience, XP hasn't even shown up much in government agencies. Many shops are still running Windows 2000 and just starting the XP migration.

I have to say I love the statement that the DOT has banned Windows Vista. What a overblown statement! It's most likely that the IT organization said that they can't/won't support it right now until critical applications are ported. They're probably using some commercial tool which doesn't yet formally support Vista and the IT org is just playing it safe. If I were head of the IT department, I'd probably do the same thing.

If they were to switch all over to SuSe and one month after a new SuSe major release the DOT said they weren't upgrading immediately, would you be proclaiming the death of Novell?

It is true that some gov't agencies just migrated to XP last year (support contracts for 2000 are behind that, as XP is still considered unstable and not enterprise quality by gov't IT decision makers). I would not expect to see Vista uptake until 2009, but articles like http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800480 and http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/03/05/dot.may.switch.to.mac/ show a new willingness to consider alternatives to Microsoft products. This includes the server side as well as the desktop side. I welcome it. I think having a homogeneous network is a recipe for disaster. Several widespread problems that have not been reported outside of government convince me that our country really needs a diversity of operating systems and software, using standardized protocols and data formats to communicate.