My company has built a machine that measures wedge and roundness of lenses by reading and interacting with very precise indicators, motors, and a switch panel. The interface for the machine is a WPF application and it runs on Windows Vista on a normal PC bought from the store.
I've never worked with Windows Embedded, but it sounds to me like it's intended for this type of system. My question is, what does it buy me? If I were to run this on Windows Embedded Enterprise (Vista) what benefits do I get?
Do I get more control of the load, login, and all that? Can I make it more seamless where it doesn't really feel just like a normal application running full screen?
Is it something I should look into more?
Windows Embedded Enterprise is a different SKU but exactly the same OS. You will not get any better control of the load, login, etc.
If you want to do such things, you need to consider Windows Embedded Standard. The actual available version is Windows Embedded Strandard 2009 and is based on Windows XP Pro (which can still run .Net apps) and next release, Windows Embedded Standard 7, will be based on Windows 7. These OS are componentized versions, meaning you start from scratch and agregate the components of the OS you need and just these ones.
More details can be found at: WindowsEmbedded.com