[CaptainHaplo]

Hmmmm.....

Ok so you don't like the new gui approach. Fine....
You liked win95/98 better..... the classic layout. Ok....

There are simple freeware tools to get your old style, single column start menu back. Easy ways to turn transparency and fading off too.....

Literally, you can get it back to the way you seem to think it should be. Windows 7 is aimed at home consumers AND business. It has the business backend, but the fluff most home users want. You have to expect some adaptation. A number of the gui tweaks are great for most folks, like the preview pane for minimized applications.

Still, put it however you want. As an IT professional, I have to point out that your basically complaining about a few dings in a paint job when your car just got a major revamped engine that now actually runs right, where the last model had all kinds of gremlins in it.

Windows 7 did make some gui changes, but the biggest changes are way deeper under the hood, and they were major changes for the better. 2k and XP had all kinds of winsock problems, Vista was a bear due to drivers (ser2pl.sys incompatiblity with 1.1 usb ports for example....) while 7 rolled out extremely solid, with none of the major bugs or memory leaks that earlier OS's started with.

A lot of times the issue isn't the OS - its those who use it. Don't get me wrong, when M$ came out with the MMC, I was yelling like crazy about how they hosed up administration. I had User Manager and Server Manager, why muck with things? Adapting isn't easy, but sometimes progress happens, and it takes us old timers a while to get used to it.

When in doubt - shortcuts on the desktop!