[Ziggurat]

Just built mine and very happy. It performs great, but i'd expect that on a Q9300 with 8gb ram.

even with the tweaks to make it more workstation like it still misses some of the features i've come to expect from a desktop / vista.

for some reason windows media player media sharing is disabled in server 2008 - which made it easy to stream mp3's off the media centre. Also the nice shell feaures like 'play all' if you open a folder with mp3's - not sure if this is just a tick box I have yet to find though.

Also I cant sleep / hibernate the machine - not sure if theres a tweak out there to enable that yet - but I use hibernate a lot usually.

Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are identical at the core. You can make vista perform very well for your purpose if you just disable a few of the heavy services like search..