Well, I tried installing Service Pack 2 for Vista outside of Windows update. With only a sliver left on the install bar after an hour or so of installation I was greeted with a "Catastrophic Failure" message accompanied with another error code. At this point it dawned on me that my computer was probably so far off track in its own little world after going a year and 3 months without an update that I had no choice.... so I forked over $130.00 and 5 hours of setup later I am writing you this from Windows 7 haha.
Thanks for the tips though. Vista seemed pretty terrible to me from the get go, but that maybe had something to do with it never getting updated. Windows 7 is working great so far... any chance it improves SC2 performance?! I heard its less of a resource hog than Vista was.