I don't know about the rest of you, but what I've noticed is that many people just use the standard windows picture and fax viewer to open images just to look at them and such. It's quick and fast, doesn't really have to load anything when opening pictures, but I've noticed something with my dSLR photos. On photos that I've taken and consider good, when I open them in the windows viewer, they look blurry and horrible. To fix this I've found out if you click the "Actual Size" button, then click the "Best Fit" button (which basically puts it back to how it was) that it somehow makes the photo look as it should. I'm guessing when you go into actual size that something is registering the detail of the image so when you go back to the best fit it looks good, I don't know. I've started use the Nero viewer and some other ones and they don't have the same problem, they are just slower to use . Anyone know why this happens or how to make it just work the first time?

I noticed the same bug, it's really weird and fairly annoying. It's almost like an unintentional 1x Gaussian blur. On another note about it being fast, I've noticed that after having vista installed for a while, there's an odd delay before files get displayed...

I'm using XP so I wouldn't know about its actions on Vista. Have you tried any alternative programs that have the same minimalism and simplicity as the windows default?

It might be easier to download something new than to try to figure that out, since it's probably a design issue.
Windows Live Photo Gallery for example being an update to the Photo Gallery that's in Windows Vista, but also available for XP.
http://get.live.com/photogallery/overview

I don't know if it qualifies as slower or not. I've never noticed any slowdowns. I do believe it's faster than the default Vista photo gallery app though.

Is there a way to enable smoothing on zoomed images in vista? I always found it weird that they took that out..

Oh heres another thing too, why are fullscreen sideshows so resource killing?

I just tried out live viewer. It seems to have close to the same speed when opening jpg's but I'm still seeing a slight blur. Maybe this is just me and my eyes being over critical, but it seems to still be there, not as bad as picture and fax viewer but still there.

*Edit* It is definitely still there, I did the actual size + best fit trick on picture and fax viewer, then opened the same photo in live viewer and if you alt-tab between the two you can see that the picture and fax viewer is more crisp and sharp after the trick is done.

I have to say that I've recently started using the Windows Live Photo Viewer over the default one in XP, and I like it a lot more. Not exactly sure why, probably the fact that it has the gallery built-in functions and such.

When I was using the default viewer in Vista, however, I noticed that whenever I opened a photo/image with it, the program gave it this sort of yellowish tone. Using the Windows Live version eliminated that, though.

It's because it's not resampling it with some sort of bilinear/bicubic interpolation. I'm guessing the reason it doesn't do it is because it would introduce some lag when opening larger files on the fly.