"Clear" type is turned on by default in Vista. There are some of us who think that it makes everything blurry and results in headaches. Even though I have switched it off at the system level, MS has chosen to force it upon me in window title bars, IE7 address bar and various other places. This gives me the feeling that I'm being told what's good for me.

Added to this, even though I have turned it off at the system level, I then have to manually turn it off in IE7 (it still appears in the address bar though) and each individual Office 2007 Beta application. This sucks.

I haven't seen anything in Vista that would prompt me to rush out and buy it as soon as it hits the shelves. Sure the new interface is OK and there are supposed to be some good improvements under the hood, but do I really need it in the short term? Probably not considering that it will be anything but cheap.

Take away the flashy user interface and what's left that's new? Not a lot to impress the average user.

The new Explorer is a step further backwards than the version in Windows XP. Is there anyone who can remember the excellent drive icons at the top of the interface and ability to tile 2 windows in Windows 3.1 File Manager. They lost the plot when they did away with these features. Because Explorer has always been so lame, I have used "Powerdesk", which has now become "ExplorerPlus" for many years. Pity the script kiddies at MS didn't take a look at this excellent application to see what real file management is all about.

I understand how annoying your issue can be... I have gotten used to ClearType, but before I was used to it, I found it quite annoying. I hope there'd be a way to turn it off for all programs... some monitors are not suited for it either.

I'm going to hold out until the final release to pass any kind of major judgement. It looks ok now, but if systems are going to take a performance hit, I'll have doubts. Some early benchmarks have been taken on high-end systems for games that didn't look too positive, but this is with beta code. I'm remaining optimistic there will be some big improvements made for performance.