Windows ME was one of my favorite versions of Windows, not being ironic about it either. Its infamy has more to do with how Joe Average uses computers in general.

As for Vista, while I did not use it in its day I can tell its problems were far more to do with crapass hardware manufacturers and their crapass drivers. Vista with access to 7's drivers and hardware runs just fine.

Windows ME did in fact work mostly fine here too, lol. Relatively speaking for Windows 9x performance, of course. I only used it for a year, not because I couldn't stand it but because such was the pace of major Windows updates back then.

Windows Vista was honestly worse for me, not due to bugs but for being two years ahead the curve of hardware, and GPU vendors seemingly rolling their thumbs during betas and once WDDM¹ went live, they panicked and rolled out alpha quality work. So many driver crashes compounded with the heavy RAM requirements... Other than that, and with less of an UAC nazi, I could see an OS that was similar to what Windows 7 became if I squinted. Hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and on top Microsoft optimized its performance.

In hindsight, WDDM should've been an update to Windows XP that could be rolled out well in advance and let developers focus on a single thing rather than new OS compatibility on top, and deep changes like UAC.

¹ It was necessary work though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model