found a fix that seems to be working for me on this issue... especially running vista**

right click your wow.exe shortcuts
click properties at the bottom
go to the compatibillity tab

then click the check box for run this program in compatibility mode for ... then go find and select the windows NT 4.0 setting

this seems to have been suggested on the wow forums and its solved my problem somewhat for now

14 pages on the blizzard forum on this problem and only 2 blue posts about it... ^ this is the only fix i found in those 14 pages