Developers ignoring Vista

A hopelessly vague metric. Win32 apps designed for XP run just fine on Vista. Well-designed apps don't butt up against Vista security restrictions. And all they're really charting is the exodus of developers from thick clients to web apps.

Who develops desktop applications anymore anyway (except maybe game developers).

If in the past you used to build apps for windows because that's where the installed base was, nowadays you build web apps.

I learned Delphi and VB back then when I wanted to hack together simple utilities with lots of UI. In the last couple of years I learned Django and Rails for the same purpose.