Thanks for the advice. I'm going to put it to use!

Nitpicky issues from Windows:

* Registry is an abortion of a bad idea. I remember in Windows 3.x how much better life was dealing with .ini files (if that can be believed). It corrupts all the time, fails in weird ways, has duplicate and triplicate entries for everything and is almost impossible to play around in without risking the entire system.

* CMD.exe needs a complete overhaul. I don't need a very powerful shell, but I'd like to use one that wasn't a fixed width dos prompt from 1983.

* I don't ever want to see a defrag utility again. I'm a firm believer that the more OS utilities there are for something the bigger a problem it is and there are hundreds of defrag utilities for Windows.

* I wish the default apps that shipped with Windows were a hair more powerful.

* Searching for stuff is molasses slow compared to spotlight. I actually install a utility called "everything" on all my machines that solves 80%-90% of my issues with finding things, but it seems stupid that something of equivalent power and speed isn't a built-in app.

* OS X exclusive apps. Most of them are forgettable fixes for brokenness in OS X or similar, but there are a few that are simply awesome and don't have a good (enough) equivalent in Windows. I was just thinking about this subject the other day with the release of OpenEmu.

* System slowdown. Eventually every windows system will slow down to a constant disk grind. There's no real explanation for it, you can tend the system as carefully as you want but it will happen. You can defrag as much as you want etc. But before long you'll have 10 minute boot times and it sucks. I'm trying a new approach this go around doing my day-to-day in a virtualized Windows VM and trying to keep my host system "pure" or for only things that require lots of system resources like games or music production. That way when the VM starts to slow down and piss me off I can just jettison it out an airlock.

* Multiple workspaces/desktop. I mean common! It's so well done in OS X I can't believe there isn't even a basic version of this in Windows by now.

* I hate the libraries, my documents "here's how to organize your shit into folder" noise. I've avoided it since XP and haven't ever been disappointed I did so.

* I hate how various programs will just create folders in my documents

* The installation stuff it messed up and I hate how uninstalling software leaves bits of it all over the system. I can't believe that this isn't better sandboxed by now. For a while I used to use sandboxie to solve this, but it got annoying enough that I've just solved it with VMs now.

* hiding file extension, in favor of just showing them in another column is an abortion of an idea and I turn on file extension as the first thing I do when I setup a new machine.

* windows update loves to restart my machine when I'm in the middle of doing things. There's a fix for it, but I've made a rule not to edit the registry for annoyances.

* sticky keys, until I turn it off.

* UAC still gets annoying. Especially during startup. Some apps, like Everything, still trigger it when I startup, and it's stupid and I want to have an option to stop prompting me about it. There is a resolution, but it's so involved that I can't be bothered.

* right-click context menus either don't populate or they get cluttered. I've never been "happy" with what's in them and there's not a clean way to edit it.