1. As far as installation, I much preferred Ubuntu. The setup was quicker and I thought gave me more control, especially about where on the hard drive I wanted it and how much space I wanted to use. I think it took me about four times as much time to install Vista.
2. I like that Ubuntu uses themes, however the default options are a little lacking. Vista comes with more pre-built packages that I like a lot more and has more options for tweaking overall. As far as the difficulty of changing settings for either OS, I would say about the same. Both are pretty simple and easy to find.
3. Open office is about as useful to me as wordpad. Both are free of course and seriously lacking features. Open Office doesn't really stand up to Word though. I don't think it was really designed to. Word is packed with some features that I really use a lot. One of the more important is that you can use word extremely well when citing sources. Word will use the proper formating when citing a source and build a nice works cited. Open Office of course does not have many of these important features.
4. I was unable to use the help service to map a network drive. Windows help service excels in being a completely comprehensive guide to any problem under the sun pretty much. I thought Ubuntu's help service performed pretty dismally. I can't exactly expect it to be anywhere as good as Windows though. Windows is by far the most dominant OS and needs to have a comprehensive help system. Linux comes in so many varieties and flavors where windows comes in pretty much one. It would be extremely difficult to expect and one distro to have nailed out a perfect guide.
5. Ubuntu gives me more control over what I can see. With windows I cannot access any of my files saved on the Ubuntu partition. With Ubuntu I can access any files on the hard drive.
I really like that this version of Ubuntu has two separate work spaces. I have used programs that emulate this feature in windows, but I wish it came built in as I run out of space quickly.
Windows navigation is far prettier. Linux is very ugly looking to me with any of the themes I tried.
Connecting to a wireless network has been extremely difficult for me before with Ubuntu. Windows makes networking extremely easy.
Windows killer advantage to me is that everything can be done with a gui. I have rarely absolutely needed a console to get something done with windows. With Ubuntu, it's pretty likely that you are going to run into a situation pretty quickly that can't be solved by clicking the right settings in a text box.
If I had to switch to Ubuntu in a work environment it would be no big deal. I could not replace windows as main OS though. Ever.