It makes me laugh how people hate Vista so much. Personally I've been using it for almost a year and a half now, and I've never had any trouble with it. It's certainly a damn sight more stable than XP ever was. That said, I am using a 64 Bit version of Vista, which is more stable / reliable than the 32 Bit version. On recent hardware, Vista rules all, but if you have oldish hardware, it's a waste of time trying to use Vista, keep XP. People are just stuck in their XP ways, and fail to learn how to use / optimise Vista properly ...
More on topic, to see LFS updated to take advantage of DirectX 9 would be nice, but it's not the be all and end all. What I would like to see the most if LFS taking advantage of multiple CPU cores, as they are getting very common now a days. As for the PhysX side of things, Ageias PPU may be fairly dead, but the PhysX technology certainly isn't, especially now nVidia has taken it on. I dunno what advantage it would really bring to LFS, but it would be no harm to impliment some extra effects for those who have compatible hardware ...
Just my opinion ...