The answer is, you can’t know without trying. Microsoft has apparently decided not to produce a list of applications that don’t work well with its new version of Windows Vista.

I needed to consider this problem when my computer kept freezing when I started Firefox, which I prefer greatly over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

A Web search has revealed a number of users having the same kind of problem.

In my case, I first attributed it to a faulty mouse driver.

A driver is a piece of software that allows your operating system to work with a piece of hardware, like a mouse, keyboard, network card and so on. I’ve had freezes over the years that were caused by drivers and mouse incompatibility.

If you have a problem like this, the first thing you should do is head to the manufacturer of your hardware and check for a Vista-compatible version of the driver.

I did that by going to Logitech, the maker of my cordless mouse. Sure enough, they had a new driver, but unfortunately, Vista still crashes, off and on, when I start Firefox.

A look at reporting around the Web finds that Firefox is not the only app that doesn’t work well with Vista.

I was shocked — and no doubt many accounting professionals were, as well — to find out that past versions of Intuit’s QuickBooks, in many ways an industry standard, weren’t compatible with Vista. Only QuickBooks 2007 can guarantee that.

What I found discouraging was that Microsoft had no plans for putting out a list of applications that are broken under the new Vista.

Apparently Microsoft had issued just such a list when it released XP Service Pack 2, a free major download that fixed a variety of security problems and other complaints.

The trouble was that, with each new fix, one program would fall off the list, and another failed one might be added.

Just keeping the list up-to-date became a problem, one Microsoft seeks to avoid with Vista.

By the way, Microsoft broke a few of its own apps, such as the interface program to its own Zune MP3 player, and its SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1.

Reports say Microsoft has gone out of its way to insure backward compatibility with older applications, and that’s to be commended.

However, it comes with a cost: bloated code. You may have noticed that Vista has grown so huge and complicated code-wise that it has to be sold on a DVD disk.

The problem here is that with all that bloated code, stability issues can arise, and users can experience slowdowns and weak performance.

I haven’t noticed that much. I find Vista to be the best looking and feeling operating system Microsoft has ever put out.

But I sure hope it doesn’t wreck my Firefox. I really love Firefox.

On another note, a chief reason for loving Firefox is its ability to save all your open tabs as your Start Page.

For example, if you’re like me and you love your blogs, you can have eight of them open and then go to Tools, Options, and click on Use Current Pages.

When you start Firefox the next time, all the tabs will open up as your Start Page. That’s a feature I really appreciate.