We know the standard Vostro works well with Hoster and XP. Is your graphics and audio standard or optionally added?
Given what has been tried, I agree with Dale and Henry, it sounds like a driver problem. The reason we added the Tools menu Playback Offset control years ago... video cards with out of date drivers always exhibited an offset, but never different between brands.
I think you need to contact Dell and either get a new driver, or return the unit to them and get one with XP. It is best not to replace the Windows OS on a system you bought with a different OS. Doing so breaks the warranty and they won't help you after that. If they say they don't have a newer driver for Vista, return it and get XP.
We do NOT recommend Vista, and here is yet another proof reason. We didn't recommend XP until SP2 was released. Vista is still in pre-release as far as we are concerned.
