The splash screen has changed slightly.

As you can see, with Windows Vista Microsoft has completely redesigned the UI once again. The new, shiny taskbar, translucent glass-like windows, and the translucent "Sidebar" now use 3D-acceleration to draw themselves. If you don't have hardware that supports it, you get bopped into a less-appealing version of basically the same thing.
I have seen this somewhere before...oh yes, that's right, Mac OS X has had something like this for a while. A very long while, and in fact this new UI (which Microsoft calls Aero) actually somewhat mimics the Aqua look from Mac OS. Ah, well, I guess it is nice to see Microsoft catching up with the times.

On first boot, you will see this thing called the Welcome Center, which provides a list of tasks that you can perform if you are new to Vista.

First thing is first: let's get rid of the background so we can reduce the file sizes of these screenshots (and also prevent some interesting-looking graphics on older machines).

For years, the way to do this has been to select Properties from the right-click context menu. With Vista, that all changes! The option is now called Personalize, and it brings up this webby-looking control panel applet that replaces the old Display Properties dialog box.

The start menu now opens up the programs sub-menu into itself, which is a nice touch to saving space since most PCs have program lists a mile long.

It is at this point that I started to get quite irritated with this new Sidebar thing. I don't need an analog clock when there is a perfectly usable digital one in the lower right anyways, that RSS feed thing will not get set up since I won't use it, and WHAT THE F is with that stupid picture thing? It changes every few seconds, and that is VERY distracting!
As you can see, it is possible to add more "gadgets" to it, but any sane person would probably just close the damn thing like I did.

I've seen this somewhere else too, Mac OS X has a thing called the Dashboard, which is pretty much the same. But at least with that implementation it isn't in your face all the time.