Mark,
Yes, if you went to the trouble of hooking up the other monitor, keyboard, mouse then you could buy / make / use a crossover Cat-5 cable connected to the network cards in each computer.
More often than not, no matter which method you use, you're likely to find that you will still have to "Feed the monster", that is, reload / install major programs that write data to the registry.
These files are not going to be copied to your Vista machine during your normal copy routine.
Yeah...bummer.[B)]