would like to comment that my new laptop hp dv9033cl with a nvidia geforce go 7600, has issues with Vista Screen fails to load if the monitor lid is closed.  No problem with my desktop with an ATI card.  Good to hear that some people know how to take a gift.

waiting for your review :)

I come to you as a former DirecTivo owner.  I've been running my homebuilt Media Center PC for the past 3 years attached to my Sony HDTV using DVI, and the problem today isn't really with the video card manufacturers, it is with the display device.  I was working at Microsoft at the time, and so I was heavily involved with the internal MCE dogfooding distribution lists.  Things are measurably better today.

One of the first problems to overcome, was that nVidia refused to listen to the EDID information as reported by a device... or more accurately when the device was reporting incorrect EDID information, there was no elegant way to correct things.  Consumer electronics don't care, and just blast away their signal at whatever NTSC or PAL resolution they've been set to, and they expect the display device to just pick it up an run with it.  If it doesn't work, such as if your TV can't scale up 720p, you just had to pick a different resolution.  nVidia cards wouldn't work like that.  The ATi cards would, but for rendering HD, the nVidia cards at the time were faster and ATi would appear jittery as it dropped frames.

Unfortunately, many display manufacturers don't run at 1:1 pixel match.  Compound that with the fact that some display manufactures have sets that have resolutions that aren't multiples of 8 (a requirement for nVidia) and you might have to either run at a resolution that had blank scan lines.  In other cases, you had to choose between using the scaler in the display or using the one in the video card.

Fortunately, most of that's all in the past, but some sets still expect the incoming signal to contain some overscan.  My Sony is one of them as well, but I'm a bit surprised the plasma you have exhibits it.  All I can figure is that your set doesn't actually have 720p scan lines.  It's also possible that the amount of overscan varies by what input is being used.

For me, I use the resolution in a resolution technique.  I run a timing that looks like 1080i to the set, but I tell Windows that I have a slightly smaller resolution; a bit more like 1000i, maintianing aspect.  I still have problems with the front porch and back porch because the Sony likes to look for content and not just the timing pulses.  So horizontally, no matter what I do, the picture has a degree of overscan.  There is no way to compress the horizontal timing or adjust it to fit neatly.  I generally watch media content through my XBox 360 using it as an extender.  Beautiful, but it exhibits the same overscan problem... it isn't an MCE issue.

Moving forward, things are going to be getting much better.  I'm not without some complaints over Vista MCE myself... I would have been much more vocal about them in the beta if I had capture card drivers at the time and was able to discover them, but I see a slugishness that I didn't have with MCE2K5.  There are enough other features that I prefer that I will be sticking with Vista (say what you will, but the new TCP/IP stack really holds its own when compared to XP).  The video card I have today is an nVidia 6600.  I can't use the official release drivers as it screws up my AERO.  The drivers I got and installed from the DVD suffice, but I am without OpenGL until I can get stable OEM drivers.  It is underpowered for playing back HD content, but the 360 looks great.  None of these are the MCE's fault.  It is still a great setup.