I know what most people think should be done but as I have read vista upgrade is completely different than the old versions of windows. It totally cleans out everything and gives you a clean install. Does anyone care to comment on this. It takes a lot longer to do the upgrade but in the long run it would save me at least 12 or more hours of reinstalling all the software on my computer.

Read about Vista here... you might answer you own question

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...y/default.mspx

Run the Vista Upgrade Advisor... and 12 hours of reinstalling software... You don't believe in back up's? I can reinstall XP and all my apps and data in less than 1 hour. The MS Updates may take a little longer. I keep my program install files, data, documents, favorites and email contacts backed up on an external 100GB drive and on another 1 of the 4 drives in my system

ExtremeTech just had an article on this. It can be found here.

It appears that in everything they tested the performance is nearly identical. With clean performing slightly better sometimes and upgrade winning on others, the numbers are so close though that effectively it is the same performance. The upgrade is performed quite differently than upgrades of previous versions of Windows, so the conventional wisdom of a clean install is always preferred is no longer true.