I've had to turn UAC off for my 2008 dev system also, despite similar feelings about wanting to be able to use it. It's just too painful to need to keep track of the running context of every single application in order for things like drag/drop between windows to work, or interacting with remote systems, or debugging scenarios, or any number of other tasks. UAC was a good idea in theory, but there seems to have been so little effort put in to making it functionally useful for real-world power users, that at the end of the day, the only feasible solution is to disable it entirely.
VS 2005 was a pain in Vista, and there's a lot of little gotchas even when running as administrator. See if you can upgrade to 2008, which works a lot better on Vista.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.