Now, back on topic...

Any updates?

Not if you want to keep all of your chunks loaded at once so that your farm still grows while you're journeying or your traps (especially with the upcoming hoppers in the Redstone update) are still working and collecting resources.

Let's make sure to stay on topic

Lets see. I tried MC on Vista, and there was no flicker though I had thought there was. So there is that - no flicker on Vista. MC runs a ton slower on Vista, though, which is why I don't use it.

LWJGL and OpenAL - aren't those things provided by Minecraft itself, in the bin/natives folder? Thus it would seem to me that those files would be the best?

I tried finding old Windows 2000 LWJGL and OpenAL libraries, but failed. I tried updating OpenAL; that didn't help... I tried installing ATI Catalyst Control Center - but it wouldn't run (claimed to need .NET framework). And I tried updating LWJGL - that didn't help.

Also, I have built in VIA AC '97 Audio, which interestingly, installed by itself on Vista, but on Windows 2000, I had to manually download the driver and tell Windows "Use this driver. Right here".

That's not how that works. And as you already posted, Minecraft's RAM usage is not above 512MB. Your increase is stupid and does nothing except to increase paging to disk.

@Caleb: If Minecraft is slower in Vista it's because you forgot to install your video card drivers.

For pete's sake, why would I forget that? I downloaded the newest one available from AMD.