there appears to be a problem with getting the fose to work with vista have they fixed that

OBSE, FOSE, and NVSE all worked on Vista for me without issue. Might be UAC messing with you?

I had an issue where FOSE caused a hardcrash of FO3 without fail.

I really hope they fix that, it severely limited my mod enjoyment.

That's not hitting home at all for me and generally isn't what script extender users experience from all I've gathered. The only times I thought *SE was messing with me, it turned out to be an *SE dependent mod/plugin... I'll bet, if you post in the NVSE/FOSE threads respectively, the authors will be able to help pinpoint whatever's going wrong. Those cats are uber sharp.