Ok, I’ve made the switch to XP and…eh…it’s…ok I suppose, but I’ve never, ever had an OS where I had to turn off so much crapware, bells and whistles and idiot-proofing features as I have here. Pfui.
That said, I’m here and it’s working, but there’s one or two features that are driving me nuts but don’t really affect functionality. ANY help would be appreciated.
- Most important feature to kill: This is hard to describe. I’m using the “Windows Classic” look, not the “Blue Meanie” default. On the toolbar, between the quickstart area and the tray are a series of buttons that appear when programs are opened. Here’s what’s hard to describe–they behave differently than they did in 2K, and I’m not exactly sure I can describe how.
Open four or five applications. Then open another and watch the task-bar. The icons will, for lack of a better word, grow and shrink. They don’t just change size, there’s an animation involved which I find as distracting as hell. The stupid buttons shrink or grow to fill the toolbar so there’s no empty space. If you only have two buttons, they’ll fill the space between the quickstart area and the tray. On 2K, the buttons had a fixed maximum size so the button-size didn’t change as much.
As it is, as often as I open and shut windows, It’s like there’s this annoying little dance going on down there. (Plus I hate the sliding animation). I’d swear that I’d seen how to disable that in the registry on the “Windows Annoyances” page, but since they’ve gone sort-of commerical, they’re really hard to use.There must be a way to turn this off. It keeps catching the corner of my eye and I keep having to glance at the toolbar. Playing with the “lock toolbar” feature doesn’t do it, neither does the “group toolbar options” one. HELP! This “feature” alone is bugging me enough that I’m almost tempted to revert back to 2K.
- There’s some sort of idiot media control panel. Every time I put in a new cd/dvd/etc, it pops up and asks me what I want to do. How the hell do I kill it? I have real applications that can play it and I want to use them without having to go through an extra screen to click. Yeah, I can click on “Choose this action each time” for each type of media I insert, but isn’t there just a way to turn it off?
Thanks for any advice, and expect more questions later! 
Fenris