I figured out a fix for FF7's audio in Vista. Unlike XP, you cannot change your default midi driver in Vista, nor can you simply mute midi since M$ decided to remove the mixer. As a result if you play FF7 in vista, you get the aweful M$ midis playing over your own audio in ff7music. These reasons are just several reasons to never use Vista, but if you have a Geforce 8800 and want to play FF7 in HD, you don't have much of a choice.
A year ago or so, I discovered that in XP, the terrible midi sound bank that M$ provides is stored in c:\windows\system32\drivers\gm.dls . By using Awave studio or other program, you could take soundfonts (including the ones from FF7 and FF8) and convert them to the dls format. Then you could back up the old gm.dls and replace it and anything that plays midi would sound good. More details here:
http://digg.com/mods/Midi_Hacking_use_soundfonts_with_any_soundcardLike xp, there is a file at c:\windows\system32\drivers\gm.dls that presumably does the same thing. There is also a copy of it in C:\Windows\winsxs\x86_microsoft-windows-audio-mmecore-other_31bf3856ad364e35_6.0.6000.16386_none_8ac7060813a4d0d2 though I'm not sure why and I deleted that file by accident and it wouldn't let me put it back. Unlike XP however, you can't just put a good sounding dls file there or it will sound even worse. I don't know why, but I am continuing to research.
So on to the fix for Vista. You can't just remove the gm.dls file or the midi engine will fail and ff7music won't start. You also can't just make a text file, call it gm.dls and replace. But, you can replace it with a blank file you create with awave studio. One such file I created is here:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/df8c83So basically, backup your old gm.dls and replace with the downloaded file to mute (but not break) midi audio in vista.