Setting up a new Windows development machine is a pain.  In fact it's more work than setting up a Linux development machine.  In Linux the package manager for the OS, the Rails package manager, and/or the Eclipse update manager handles most of this for me.  In Windows I'm forced to install things individually using separate installers.  Here's the minimum I had to install on my brand new Windows Vista box to get a decent development environment:

• Visual Studio 2005
• VS 2005 SP1
• VS 2005 SP1 patch for Vista
• Windows Vista SDK
• WCF for VS 2005
• .NET 1.1 Runtime (yes, I still have a project that compiles .NET 1.1)
• ReSharper 3 for C#
• SVN
• TortoiseSVN
• VisualSVN

That's just to get my machine compiling our code, that doesn't even include the numerous other tools I need to be productive like Paint.NET or MS Office.  All in all, I had to install around 30 applications yesterday!  No wonder I've been dragging my feet on getting a new system for the past month.  The good news is, I'm now done and this new 3GHz dual core system with 3GB or RAM freakin' rocks compared to my old Dell Dimension 4600.