Speaking of OT discussions, did you ever solve the VLC problem you mentioned above on March 22? It works fine on a Vista 6.0.6002 x86 physical system, which obviously doesn’t help you at all. If “upgrading” to build 6003 per se broke VLC, it shouldn’t have taken two years for someone at MSFN to notice that, so your VMWare theory seems better.
I’m expecting a new VLC version to be released very soon, and another theory comes to mind: Is it possible that you don’t have Platform Update for Windows Vista installed? You may want to search Installed Updates for KB960362, KB971512, KB971513, KB971514 and KB2117917. (They should be available from Microsoft Update Catalog or greenhillmaniac’s repository.) Version compatibility summary at VideoLAN wiki remarks, “It is highly recommended to install the Platform Update.” The changelog for VLC 3.0.0 at GitHub was somewhat more adamant: “Windows Vista (all versions) without Platform Upgrade is not supported.”