Amen to brink
I have also read the article about the fingerprint security giving this error message
Although i can not find this article

True to the above fact this may not be your problem but may very well be due to very low system specifications
Many people trip up on the common misconception of the recommended requirement of vista
The misconception is most commonly where the end user miss-interoperates the recommended and minimum requirements
For example sake
recommended system requirements are
1GHz processor
1GB of ram/system memory
40GB HDD/hard drive space
128MB of video memory minimum
minimum system requirements are
1GHz processor
512MB of ram/system memory
20GB HDD/hard drive space
128MB of video memory minimum
Both recommended and minimum will run vista however not without extreme resource loss
Fact is that if you want a good system without suffering from huge resource losses then you need to double the recommended system requirements
In example
Recommended system requirements are
2.4GHz processor
2GB of ram/system memory
80GB HDD/hard drive space
256MB of video memory minimum
Here then you will have a stable system with an ample amount of system resources
Remember one important fact..... Vista was designed to run on the most powerful systems currently on the market at the time of release and also for future hardware releases
Microsoft realised that not everyone would be able to afford to update there pc's and that vista would fail and they would make a huge loss in profits with the sales from vista
Microsoft made vista as backwards compatible as they could so as to not loose the trust of potential customers and not end up in a financial loss of an operating system that they had spend millions of $$ on
They may not be so good at making a perfect OS but they are Damn well good at misleading us and taking our hard earned cash