I rarely see it on Windows 7. Only when installing software and when starting CCleaner, Autoruns and Process Explorer. And it takes just a second to click yes. But that's just me. :p

there's nothing we cant do wth xp pro
here's the layout
note the availabilty of the sidebar , the explorer shortcuts , the general look :)

Just being curious, but if you have XP pro setup to be like vista, then why do you dislike vista?
I actually agree that a lot of the stuff on vista can be done on XP (i used to use a number of bits of software, tweaks and skins to do it), but it's all nicely built into vista, plus they've made hundreds of tiny but nice tweaks. I haven't run into a single thing since upgrading to vista that has annoyed me.
Maybe early vista was worse? I didn't upgrade until SP2 time, so i can't say.
My personal opinion is that Vista's bad reputation was based on 2 factors.
(a) many people didn't/don't need to upgrade
(b) (and this is the main one) its system requirements were too high for many PCs at the time of launch.* Plus they didn't do themselves any favors by selling those "vista basic capable" pcs that would run it, but only barely, and with all the effects turned off... it really annoyed everyone.
*it's interesting that win7 is getting almost universal praise, when it's essentially vista. I think this is in a large way down to the fact that PCs have caught up with the OS requirements.

Vista did fail pretty badly at launch, there were driver problems by the bucket (something to do with hardware devs needing to have the drivers approved and so not bothering, doubly so with supporting legacy hardware), the day one release was slow as a dog with 1 leg even on good systems and it had some issues with stability
That aside, I think there were 2 things that killed vista. The first was the 'word of badmouth' campaign where people who OBVIOUSLY had never seen the OS in action were parotting misinformed or biased shit they read on the internet to any and all in a manner reminiscent of fox news and Mass Effect. Unlike Mass Effects hardcore digital interactive porn that can even give you VD, it wasn't all untrue but it was no shittier overall than Day 1 XP.
The second was the design side issue, it was DIFFERENT. People actually had to sit down and find things again, icons looked different, the control panel was reorganised, it made people who had used one system for the better part of a decade have to adapt to something new. NATURALLY it was the "w0rst 0S evar!!!11". They'd forgotten the fact that they had to do the exact same thing with xp.
Windows 7 isn't much different to vista from what I've seen but it its NOT vista which makes it okay for people to like. More than likely when 7 is released to the masses, it'll be full of "awesome new features" that were already in vista

well let me elaborate a bit on vista. It was indeed the first version i installed. I like to try new stuff anyway so i went ahead and installed this on a spare HDD.
First thing that went wrong , drivers.
Printer didn't respond and couldn't be found , a shitload of errors , frontpanel wasn't found , games didn't run properly , unexpected crashes which i've never had before.
I even liked windows Millenium more then this one :)
what i did like was the interface and all the tiny shortcuts which made life a bit easier (but that got totally decimated by the continuous stream of infamous errors)
So i thought it might be a bad install that i downloaded. I asked the original disk from a friend and installed it. My printer was found on that install , the rest remained the same.
Also i saw my hardware was stretched to the limit : i'm used to seeing about 50% of RAM available during gaming. Now it was only 10%. It also seemed quite slow to react to general commands. I don't have a killer rig but i'd say its quite fast and handles most games on full with no problem.
After trial and error for about 5 days i gave up and decided to go back to XP.
EVERYTHING worked. Games worked like they should + no more ghost errors and generally a faster system.
What i did like a lot whas the general look and feel of the desktop , explorer , settings , gadgets , ... . So thats when i downloaded the progs and voila : solid OS , good gaming experience and the look i wanted. It's taken them years to get XP working as it should so i give them the benefit of the doubt. They need to work out everything again.
It's like all the games need patching and programs need updates. Never understood why this hype came up all of the sudden.
You don't go buy a car with a flat tire where they promises to send you a good tire after 2 months.
Anyway i can understand to the points you guys give about bad mouth commercials. I don't take part in it and rather try it myself first. IF they make a solid working OS thats better then XP , i'd change immediatly to try it out.

I feel quite different in that regard, but I only started using Vista after the first service pack was released though. Same with XP, actually. Up until then I was using Win98.
EDIT:
And I didn't start using 98 until SE.

CyPhErIoN, your experience does sound fairly typical of lauch day vista, printers and scanners were the most notorious of driver faults. SP1 improved vista a fair bit but SP2 made it good. If it wasn't for the fact that 7 is just about here I'd suggest giving vista another go
Did you ever have the original release of 95? Boy that one was a nightmare, it made DOS look user friendly and fault tolerant. 95C ended up being pretty good, better than 98 anyway. 98SE was awesome as far as the 9x code went, way better than ME which had the look of 2K with the functionality of 95

i was purely being sarcastic m8.
ME was plaged enormously back in the days.
Alias i do recall 95 :D
come to think of it , i should wait till 4 months later to try a new os. Its a vicious cycle that keeps reoccuring. So i might give it another go this vista OS.
Hopefully they've managed to get rid of all those nasty errors.
And otherwise i can count on you guys to help out if needed :)

Considering that I pretty much only used PC for gaming up until I started using 98, I mostly stayed in DOS (thankfully). The only thing I ever had to use Windows for, was the Warcraft 2 construction set, and by that time 95 was stable enough. 98SE was awesome though, despite being somewhat unstable. Probably my favorite Windows OS overall.
I was almost hoping so... ME was pure shite, and when I used it for the short time I did, I could see no improvement whatsoever over any previous Windows version I've used.

my point and feeling exactly about vista ;)
but i'm going to retry it shortly. I'm looking it up in To Rent ;)
No way i'm buying this yet :p

renting windows? Never knew you could get it on Steam...

Despite there not being not much new in Vista, I could see more immediate positive changes than I could in ME, where I could see none. But then again, I spent ages tweaking Vista before I began to be pleased with it. Also, considering that I bought Vista Ultimate for around $21, through work, I don't have much to complain about.

so far the disguise then.
Try reading it very fast and listen carefully..
Don't make me fully spell it or i might be prosecuted again.

Again? Have you been getting "Demos" a lot lately?

considering games actually NO. I did do it for other games to try them out. Like overlod i downloaded , tried it , liked it , bought it.
We need to support good games as to receive more good games.
Software from bill gates YES most definately.
He's rich enough already and he still feeds us bogus stuff.
Imagine games for windows 0_0
But when it costs less than 3.5days of work i might consider buying it.
150€ is way to much in my opinion. (about 220$)
PS : i once got prosecuted from metallica years ago (NAPSTER)