You're completely right. UAC was too aggressive (they admitted that was their mistake) and a few other bits needed tuning but it was actually quite an improveme

You're completely right. UAC was too aggressive (they admitted that was their mistake) and a few other bits needed tuning but it was actually quite an improvement over XP. 7 was what it should have been. All those glitches though came from MS's far too aggressive and unrealistic plans for Vista. A couple years before it launched, 2003 I think, I was heavy in the Mozilla world, and had a high-ish profile in the community (I ran MozillaNews.org and was a long time triager). Robert Scoble tried to hire me to be a bridge between MS and Mozilla, a tech evangelist for features of Longhorn (as Vista was known then) that could help Mozilla, or really features that Mozilla could be a showcase for and be a tech ad for MS. I set aside my suspicions and gave it a try, learning about the technical side of Vista. I learned a lot, and wound up not taking the gig. I told him I didn't think these things has any real benefit to a cross platform application like Mozilla, and that I had real doubts they'd have any real impact on the market even if they were delivered, which I had strong doubts about. The three tentpoles MS wanted Mozilla to use were: 1. Avalon/WPF 2. Palladium 3. WinFS 1. I told Scoble that I saw no benefit in Avalon yet as in 2003/4 Mozilla wasn't really about to dedicate lots of time and attention to coding for some new graphics API that wouldn't be launched for years. He said it would be out much sooner. I said I had my doubts given it's rather early stage of development. 2. "Imagine users knowing their online banking and purchases are 100% secure thanks to the hardware and their OS!" I said I thought the idea was rubbish, a nonstarter, and I hoped it failed. 3. WinFS. My arguments were simple, "apps like this don't care about the FS. Plus, it'll never launch. I have zero faith this feature will be out before 2010. Filesystems are hard, and MS has a long history of cutting features to get products out the door. This is a prime target to be cut." He argued it was solid and amazing, etc, as a good tech evang should, but in the end I said no to the whole deal. I couldn't in good conscience try to push tech that I didn't believe in and didn't even think would ever release. They were hell bent on shoving all this and more in Longhorn, rather than a smaller release in 2004 and finish the other features later. And thus, we got Vista. Lots of great tech, rushed out the door, and poorly configured.