It's been the same since Windows 95: auto-hidden on the bottom. But I use the Start Search feature for launching basically everything, so I don't even pay attention to the task bar. My OS X machine has the Dock auto-hidden on the bottom; my KDE box has the panel auto-hidden on the bottom. Just easier to work with.
Besides some early Macintosh machines at my school, my first GUI was GEOS. Thus, for me, pull-down menus ought to be at the top of the window/screen. Thus, I also place the taskbar at the top of the screen.
HA HA YOU'RE OLD
Nah, just kidding. I remember GEOS...never had it on my own machine, but was completely mindblown when I was like 6 and ran into it on a computer at school. "What _is_ this thing?"
I'm kinda surprised that there isn't some code in windows to handle that case... IMNSHO that's the job of the window manager to fix... i wouldn't think it'd be hard...
It's not, and it has been correctly handled since at least XP (and I think earlier) for programs that defer to the window manager for startup position. Programs that attempt to start in a specific window position, however--as in, they specify coordinates to start at, which is not recommended as per the Windows platform guidelines--the window manager will honor them, under the (poor, IMO) assumption that the program knows what it's doing.
Wait, no, i'm not surprised at all... this is the same company that's overhauled the UI for office for no discernible reason... as long as they don't try to slap a "ribbon" onto notepad...
You might complain, but Microsoft has these people called UX specialists. Their job isn't to make life easier for
you, it's to make life easier for people who don't use computers all that much. And even most experienced users who've spent a lot of time with Office 2007 will concede that t's worth it. I do a lot of work in Office, and I hated 2007 at first, but the Ribbon is
incredibly useful if you do a lot of intensive work; my only real complaint is a lack of a snapback feature to go back to the first tab on the ribbon. Well, that, and Publisher and OneNote still having an old-style interface, but Office 2010 should fix that.
Killing off explorer is a useful action, if you know what you are doing. Especially if you know how to restart it(start explorer.exe, however you want).
What is it with wannabes trying to do things the hard way all the time? I guess killing it is useful if it locks up (which does happen more often than is desirable), but that's just an absolutely silly thing to post in a vacuum.
Do you really need that 400KB of RAM?