Several Questions

the site is fine. tell vista to go to hell

backup the entire 'my filters' folder, generally found in c:\documents and settings\(your account name)\application data\ .

in the main window, with the presets on the left and the main rendering window on the middle and right, top to bottom, the bar under that is the rendering bar, not a download bar. it may appear that a rendering is done when looking at the image, but remember, if anti-aliasing is turned on, sometimes you cant hardly tell by watching the image that something is still going on. (and on my machine, that bar is blue).