I received my Acer Aspire One (AAO) this weekend.  As I mentioned before, the first order of business was to reload the operating system.  Loading the OS on this class of device - netbook - requires the use of a USB flash drive if you don't have access to an external CD drive.  You can find a tool called USB_MultiBoot_10 at boot-land.net.  That is the tool referenced in the how-to video I found on YouTube.  Even though I wanted to use Vista, I ran through the process as shown in the video for an XP install to familiarize myself with the procedure.  I made it through without any problems using a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager.  Next I moved to Vista.  The USB Mulitboot tool allows this as well.  The setup is not as straightforward as XP steps without a video as a guide, but I found this post that made the process clearer.  The steps are laid out in the Aug 30 2008, 11:54 PM post by user 'wimb'.

Drivers

This table shows the drivers you'll need for the AAO:

All the XP drivers can be downloaded from the support section of the Acer site.  As shown above, the Vista drivers are included for the sound card and chipset.  The others worked anyway except for the network, both NIC and WiFi.  I found this post that showed where the Atheros WiFi drivers could be found.  The downloads were slow, but worked.  As the post says, after installing the drivers in the "Install Vista 6120 1009.zip" use the other download files to update the last errant device in the device manager.  Under XP, the touchpad software adds the ability to scroll vertically and horizontally using the edges of the touchpad.  The software will not install under Vista.  One other note: when installing the video driver I was asked whether to install it even though the currently installed version was newer.  If you encounter the same thing yourself you'll notice the version number of the one from Acer is a higher revision.  I continued with the installation.

All that's left to do now is download several hundred megabytes of updates.