There is a way to change the ridiculous size of the icons - right-click on the desktop, and from the menu that appears, there's a setting for either the icon size, or to display the icons (I'm remembering this off the top of my head as my laptop runs ubuntu!)
Anyway - you need to set it to show "classic icons" - these look exactly the same, but are the more familiar "XP" size. Only MS knows why Vista's 'default' icon size is so huge!
Have a play with the optons on the menu - one of them allows for the selection of "classic icons", which is what you need...