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EveningStarNM

Guest
Sure, I know I'm going to get a lot of static for this, but here goes anyway:

  1. Left and right panes of Explorer windows are not synchronized. The inevitable result will be (and has been) that people will press the Delete key on the wrong item. This is a major design flaw which causes the loss of data. It is anti-intuitive to have the same window represent two different locations in the navigation pane and in the contents pane.

  2. Shared folders do not have an icon indicating that they are shared. (The argument made by the Microsoft team that users wanted it removed because it cluttered the display is a lie.)

  3. If you delete a file or folder in an Explorer window, the file or folder might not disappear from the display until you refresh the view. (This is probably a bug.)

  4. With full row selection in the Details view of Explorer windows, it's harder to draw a selection box around a group of files. Full row selection can't be disabled. Users may unintentionally drag items to different locations when they are trying to draw selection boxes.

  5. The functional Internet Explorer Icon can't be put on the desktop. Only a normal shortcut can be used. After more than a decade of having a functional IE icon on the desktop, which made our lives easier, arguments that not giving users the choice to have that functionality available from the icon do not make sense.

  6. All Explorer windows which show folders open to the same size. You can't customize the size of a window for a particular folder. Being able to adjust the size of individual windows was one of the most useful features of windows. Removing the ability to personalize particular windows when personalization should be a core objective of any user interface is foolish.

  7. The user can't create a secondary file association action which he would in Windows XP. The Microsoft UI team seems to have decided that removing functionality is a good thing. I believe that removing the Microsoft UI design team would be a good thing.

  8. The user can't set security properties/ACLs/permission on multiple items from Properties because there is no Security tab like Windows XP for multiple files or folders.

  9. Explorer toolbars can no longer be customized.

  10. The "Details" metadata tab is gone from the file and folder Properties dialog. Metadata cannot be edited for popular file types without third-party add-ons.

  11. The Details pane of Explorer windows cannot be disabled even though it takes up a lot of screen space to display very little information. And, sadly, neither the Details pane nor the Status Bar show the total size of a folder being displayed when no files are selected. The only way to get a folder's size is to view its properties from the context menu.

  12. File lists in Explorer windows are automatically sorted. Auto-sorting cannot be disabled. This can be very inconvenient when working in folders with large numbers of files.

  13. The user cannot execute multiple actions on a set of files from the GUI which was possible in Windows XP.

  14. Autologon cannot be bypassed with the Shift key.

  15. The user cannot set multiple connection icons, cannot customize connection icons, and cannot access connection status quickly from the connection icon all of which was possible in Windows XP.

  16. There are no indicators of network activity in the Notification Area. They have been removed.

  17. Easily customized searching is gone.

  18. Taskbar buttons are now permanently grouped rather than displayed in the order in which they were opened. Grouping cannot be disabled (although some third-party tweakers offer ways to do this). This is anti-intuitive.

  19. The user cannot disable jumplists in favor of old context menu. Jumplists are just another menu that changes unpredictably, making navigation more difficult for the average user.

  20. The user cannot quickly access the Network Connections folder and actual wired/dial-up connections. It is buried several clicks inside the UI.

  21. New network connections, such as VPN or dial-up connections, are made from the Network and Sharing Center. But they are not shown there. They're shown and available for editing in the Network Connections windows, in which you cannot create a new out-going connection. You can only view existing connections or create a new incoming connection. This is not logical.

  22. File and folder security settings are still as cumbersome as they were in Vista, with separate dialogs used to view and edit settings. Many dialogs could be combined, and lots of extra mouse clicks could be avoided. If the goal is to clean up the UI, why this?

  23. The new Start menu style cannot be disabled in favor of the "Classic" menu. The Windows Classic Start Menu was a masterpiece of sound ergonomic design. The new style eliminates the logical structured tree view of the Classic style and confines the menu to a small window in a corner of the display. The menu does not stretch as the number of menu items increases, making scrolling necessary.

  24. The new Start menu style (actually introduced in Vista) lists folders below single items, completely reversing the format we've become familiar with over the years.

  25. Explorer now has “Favoritesâ€Â￾ and “Libraryâ€Â￾ nodes that can't be removed in the left pane. They waste space and present the same logical UI problems as having a menu that constantly changes, making it harder to find things. Items on menus and navigation links shouldn’t move unpredicably; it makes navigating harder, not easier. The Library does not make it clear to average users that files may be located on different computers or in different user accounts on the same machine. Accurate navigation requires that you know where you are and have a clear path to follow. These new “featuresâ€Â￾, as well as the new Start Menu, blur the path and make it difficult to know what you are looking at both on your computer and on the network. While this is less of a problem for expert users than for average users, average users must be the target audience.

  26. Explorer no longer shows free disk space in the status bar. This is a big problem for portable drives.

  27. Various hardware interfaces, including audio outputs and keyboard controls, are not restored properly after after waking a Windows 7 machine from Standby or Hibernate mode. The only solution is to restart the computer. These are major problems that will frustrate a lot of people.
  28. If you drag a window to the side of the display, it automatically expands to occupy half of the display. In what way is that a useful “featureâ€Â￾? Who decided that filling half of the display would be a useful size for a window? (Some third-party tweakers allow you to disable this questionable “featureâ€Â￾.)

  29. As with Vista, user interface design controls are split up into many different windows and dialog boxes rather than being conveniently accessible in a single dialog box as they were in XP.

  30. During installation, you cannot specify on which drive the boot manager will be installed.
Overall, a lot of useful functionality and information have been removed from the GUI which should not have been, and there’s no way to get it back without third-party tools. While the GUI certainly needed cleaning, this is ridiculous. It’s as crippling and expensive as forcing the world to learn a completely new UI with the Office ribbon bar after more than a decade in which the world learned to use the menus.

Microsoft should realize that sales are up not because people are happy, but because we simply have to upgrade our aging machines. Balmer’s claim that he has “no responsibility for anything besides the making of moneyâ€Â￾ will come back to bite him in the ass, hopefully very soon. Microsoft did the world a good service when it created a useful visual “languageâ€Â￾ for using computers. Drastic changes such as these only muddy the waters and make their products less useful. While it’s true that a significant, if uninformed, part of the population is satisfied with eyecandy, the rest of us are not so easily fooled.
 
Solution
E
A better menu

Check out Vista Start Menu:

Vista Start Menu – Convenient alternative to Start menu

It's a classic start menu on steroids which was written for Vista but which also works on Windows 7. I recommend it. But the author also has a more faithful classic start menu for Windows 7:

CSMenu Official Site

It looks like we'll be relying more and more on third-parties for fixes to Microsoft's user interface mistakes, which seem to get worse with each new release.
That's all he every wants to talk about. We have all told him several times that we don't work for Microsoft and could care less what operating system he favors. He just doesn't get it.
I use various flavors of Linux but my primary system is Win 7 (the RC for now however I see Win 7 Home Premium OEM in the near future).
I agree with OP on many of the points he raised but thanks to info from folks like Terry Blount and others here I've managed to customize Win 7 to suit my needs.
Win 7 is fast to boot, a big plus for me as my machine is a notebook and I always shut it down when I'm finished using it.

Of course I'm far from a casual user (I do know the difference between a HDD and a video card).

Any casual user of XP will miss some of the features he/she has gotten used to from using XP and I think
this is what the OP had in mind when he posted his list.
Few casual users would be inclined to go to the lengths I and other users here would to optimize Win 7.
More's the pity.