Apparently. Because while Vista doesn't entirely dispose of these menus, it does dump them from many single-purpose applets, all folder windows and, ridiculously, Internet Explorer 7+. While about 90 percent of the menu items from the old main menu are now available somewhere on drop-down menus connected to icons mounted on the same bar that tabs must squeeze into, the icons aren't particularly obvious. Microsoft has, as a result, remade the main menu structure on text menus that drop from icons. What's up with that? How is that improved design? It isn't. The toolbars themselves are space-constrained. The whole thing is a mess. The Address bar puts Refresh and Stop on one side of the URL field and Back and Forward on the other side, increasing mouse travel required to go between them. Why? Change for change's sake is what it seems.

You can turn the main menus back on in Internet Explorer 7+ by clicking the gear-wheel icon, choosing the Toolbars submenu and clicking the Classic Menu submenu item. To turn file menus back on in folder windows, open the Folder Options Control Panel, click the View tab and click the first item, "Always show Classic Menus."

9. Windows Defender Beta 2 is buggy.

I admire Windows Defender's real-time spyware/malware monitor because it gets the job done unobtrusively. But the Vista Beta 2 version of Defender, like the public Windows Defender Beta 2 release for Windows XP, is buggy. The Vista version's bugs are, however, in different places. Where the public Beta 2 of Defender for XP had significant installation issues and user interface controls that didn't work properly, the Vista version's woes center on scheduled scans. Even though Defender comes preconfigured for a daily 2 a.m. scan for spyware, the scan doesn't always run automatically; and when it fails, it fails silently. After three days, Defender gives you an error message that you haven't scanned your computer. A quick trip into the Defender settings area shows that, yes, it's scheduled to scan at 2 a.m., and that no, it hasn't run its scan. The problem has occurred on two of the four Vista installations I'm testing (I checked power management, and the machine was set to never sleep or hibernate on its own The machine was, in fact, left on.) Hopefully this will get figured out before Vista ships.

8. Problems without solutions.