I always had the impression that the biggest gripe with Vista were the incessant UAC dialogs asking you to approve every little thing (I think Apple even poked

I always had the impression that the biggest gripe with Vista were the incessant UAC dialogs asking you to approve every little thing (I think Apple even poked fun at it in one of their 'Hi, I'm a Mac' ads). And that this problem was actually a consequence of the (sensible) change from having all programs running with full privileges to limiting them and asking users for escalations only when needed - but since most existing programs were not prepared for this, they caused UAC dialogs left and right, where they could and should have been avoided. And understandably it took a while for all the 3rd party devs to catch up to this and change their code to fit well within this more restrictive security model. But the way I see it, this is much like pulling off a band-aid that's been on too long - it'll hurt no matter what, so best just get it over with. I imagine that if Windows 7 had been released instead of Vista and at the same time (and AFAIK it has pretty much exactly the same security model) then it would have born the brunt of all that negativity stemming from all those UAC dialogs. In other words, Vista had to take that bullet, in order for Windows 7 to go on the scene later as the hero.