[Off-topic] xaccers:
I've not had to have posts edited by mods. If you're not able to have an adult debate please do not bother reading further or replying.

I hope that isn't the case though, and you will find the following informative, and remember that many aspects of OS preference, as with cars etc, is purely down to personal preference with no right or wrong.

W7 has some good improvements over previous Windows, it also has some "what the heck were they thinking?" aspects (as with previous Windows) :)

Use this example, pin Notepad to the task bar. Open it. Now with a single click open a second new text document.

You've not supported such users then have you? Where as with the classic menu, program groups opened quickly without needing to click on them, and if you opened the wrong one it didn't matter you just moved to the next one, with W7, you have to click and scroll, not easy when you're using a tube to move the curser around, or a temple control stick.

Speach recognition is great, unless of course the user can't speak.

Yes, in XP/Vista it was in the toolbar list.

You seem to misunderstand what I mean by "new instance"

Despite each tab running under it's own iexplore.exe process, one tab can take out the lot if it crashes (oh look, IE8 has just had to recover a tab for me now for no apparent reason), so it's safer to run new instances rather than tabs. See my notepad example above for what you can't do in W7.

I was actually saying that because of the preview, app grouping now becomes usable. Before then having a group with 5 items all showing "Application Name" rather than the item open with the app was very unhelpful, making app grouping a PITA.

Needing to use the search function rather than actually using the menu shows that the menu has failings.

With the classic menu I can organise things how I work, not how MS think I work. I don't want a desktop covered in icons, or shortcuts on the task bar which only open one instance of a program, or to have to click more than once to start programs I use all the time.

You're sounding like you're only a home user. If you were a professional user in IT support you'd know what users are like, especially (not wishing to sound ageist) those over 50 who are not technically competant.

Yes that does help.

Again you're showing that you are not an IT professional (I mean this purely as an observation and not as a disparaging comment, the needs and experiences of an home user are different to those of an IT professional supporting multiple businesses).

Install a program and it will still create a program group for it under All Programs.

Classic menu can organise them alphabetically. Perhaps that's where your idea that it is disorganised comes from? Right click and select sort by name.

My laptop has 3 network devices which I regularly need access to change the settings of, and again, if you were an IT professional you'd know that you never connect to a client's network first if you know you'll need to change the NIC settings.

Which by default is not present on the desktop, and many companies restrict what appears.

In W7 it still only takes you to the Network and sharing center, where as in XP it takes you to the actual network connections.

Except when you actually work in IT support and regularly have to change network settings.

Thankfully I was able to add a shortcut to Network Connections to the quicklaunch toolbar (which has 6 shortcuts in the space of 1 pinned app).

I'm sorry but I've just had to fp over what you've posted.

C:\users\<name>\AppData is specific to the <name>, it is not the All Users' profile, which is now C:\ProgramData, with the exception of desktop/documents/etc as these have moved to C:\users\Public

If you had done the test I'd suggested you would know this.

You'd then realise that your assertion that "there should be no desktop folder in public folder" is incorrect.

The use of quotes is very simple. If there is a space, it needs to be incorporated in quotes, unless it is a directory in which case you just have to end with a \

If you've got paths longer than 255 characters in your profile then you've really got to look at what you're doing wrong.