Encryption in Vista and OS X: Not Worth It?

I read an article not long ago in Details magazine about white-hat hackers. I lost the issue, and I can't find a link, so I'm working from memory here. Anyway, a government security guy who recruits white-hat (i.e., ethical) hackers stated that he was worried about the heavy-duty encryption (called BitLocker) found in Vista Ultimate (no other versions of Vista include this feature). He said he was worried about it from a National-security perspective, but BitLocker is also supposed to make it much harder for your PC to be hacked into.

I bought a Toshiba laptop (a great machine, really) with Vista Ultimate, one of my many purchases (this one roughly $1,400) in an attempt to foil my already-hacked home network. No sooner had I plugged the machine into the ethernet cable to my modem than it seemed to be hacked again. I ran all the Microsoft security updates as soon as possible, but it was too late. Very quickly, my PC looked like it was running a copy of Virtual PC or something. Windows showed me being on a "network" which was composed of an intermediary computer between me and the internet. I wasn't on a network at all. When I tried to download and install BitLocker (although it's a Vista Ultimate feature, it still requires a download) a weird error denied my enabling the feature. Drive wipes and reinstalls didn't help. Was my mystery hacker to blame, or is Microsoft?

I ran into similar, though less paranoia-inducing, problems with OS X's File Vault (the Mac version of this strong disk encryption). My computer kept freezing, unable to recover from Sleep Mode, requiring constant restarts. Apparently this corrupted the FileVault, resulting in the below message.I ended up losing a lot of data, and found a bunch of common threads on the topic stating that the system freeze issue was a common one but pretty much unexplained at this time. Of course Apple takes no responsibility for this. As with all software companies, the warranty for the software excludes them from any sort of liability to damage that their bugs cause the end user. Bottom line of those threads was not to use FileVault on an administrator account at all. Thanks for the heads-up Apple! I've given up on FileVault altogether, though don't get me wrong, I'm still an Apple convert. Compared to Microsoft, Apple's products are far and above superior.