Microsoft Windows Vista breaks common keyboard usage patterns

If you're like me and you prefer the keyboard over the mouse then you're likely to find Windows Vista as frustrating as I do. I can't believe some of the keyboard patterns that Vista has completely busted. For example, on the common open file dialog pressing Shift-Tab from the File edit box leaves you on the column header of the listview like this:

[UPDATE] Pressing ESC from here fails to dismiss the dialog!!!

At this point, pressing Enter does this!

What the hell?? After Shift-Tab you have to press Shift-Tab again to focus the listview. Who decided making the listview columns into a tab stop was a good idea? But this is just scratching the surface, the Vista Explorer is another can of worms.

Below is a screenshot of the Vista Explorer right after I launched it, what has the keyboard focus? Pressing tab lands you at #1 then consecutive tabs take you through the rest of the backwards tab order. Based on the file open dialog I'd have expected to go from the column header to #8 but instead it jumps backwards and to the upper left corner!

There there's the sublte stuff like this for focus difference

This one is focused.

This one is not.

The next problem I struggled with for a bit was our build not working. During our build process we run gacutil and register a number of assemblies but I kept getting:

RegAsm : error RA0000: An error occurred while writing the registration information to the registry. You must have administrative credentials to perform this task. Contact your system administrator for assistance.

Well, that's just not enough. You have to right click the 4NT icon and select:

Which invariably lands you here:

By the way, I had to switch to using Remote Desktop just to get a screenshot of that dialog because PrtScn doesn't work when you're locked into a UAC confirmation.