One of Vista’s most annoying features is the tendency of Explorer to decide, first, that all your documents are music or photos; and second, that if they are, you care more about metadata like “Rating” than humdrum details such as the date of the file.

I had thought that Vista only did this if it found at least one media file in the folder, but today it happened with Control Panel:

Notice how it highlights another user-hostile feature: the name of each applet is in a column too narrow to read, and several applets are indistinguishable from each other because they begin “Microsoft .NET Frame…” or “Internet Information S…”; another triumph of branding over usability.

What I wanted was the Event Viewer; and while I’m in ranting mode, let me add that I much prefer the old NT Event Viewer to the Vista effort. The new one takes ages to populate a clever multi-pane view, which presents too much information in tiny scrolling panels. In practice I use the tree view on the left to select the log I want, subverting the new design by doing exactly what I would have done in the old Event Viewer. Habit possibly; but there are real design problems with the new Event Viewer. Administrators will always choose practical over pretty.

See here for my earlier complaint about Explorer views and a partial remedy. Why wasn’t this fixed in SP1?