Well, I took a look at the haptek website to see if they have anything to say about the haptek player on Vista ... what I discovered was not promising.
1. On the system requirements page, they do not list VISTA as an available operating system ... but if you look they DO say that you must have Direct X 6.0 ...
2. I made sure I was running the latest version available of the haptek player by downloading it and reinstalling it. When that did not solve my problem, I looked at the file properties ... and looked at the copyright info ... which is 2003 .... eesh. Now, usually companies want to keep that kind of thing current on actively developed projects ...
So these things suggest to me that the Haptek player and other haptek software a probably not under active development... and probably have not been under active development for the past six years ... so its really not surprising that its struggling on Vista ... even if vista was an excellent operating system, as the core technology moves on old software is left behind ... just think of old dos programs for a 486 that use CPU speed for game timing ... even if you can get an emulator and run the games on newer machines ... it doesn't work because everything runs to fast because your processor is so different than what it was built for ...
For that matter, the problem may NOT be vista. I remember reading somewhere that around directX 8 or 9 that programs written for older versions of DirectX had problems ...
My guess is that someday soon ... and probably without warning ... Haptek's website is just going to vanish ... and it will just be gone forever and software that uses it will just be in the lurch...
I've written Haptek support and told them I'm interested in buying a copy of people putty (I am) but only if they can help me get the haptek player working on VISTA ... maybe they will have some suggestions ... but I suspect I will never hear from them. We'll see.