• Shift+Click a taskbar icon to launch a new instance of that program.
• Ctrl+Click a grouped taskbar icon to cycle through the windows in that icon.
• Shift+Ctrl+Click a taskbar icon to launch a new, elevated instance of that program.
• Press Win+P to quickly and easily configure a multi-monior system.
• Use Win+Up, +Down, +Left, +Right to Maximize, Minimize/Restore, and dock windows to the left or right.  You can drag windows to the sides and top of the workspace for a mouse-based version of the same commands.  ”Shake” windows to minimize all other windows.
• Disabling the “Base Filtering Engine” service and all dependant services is a good way to cut down on running services if you don’t need the Windows Firewall.
• Don’t disable the “Function Discovery” or “HomeGroup” services as it will break file and folder sharing.
• If your computer is waking up every day at 3am, stop and disable the Windows Media Center Receiver Service, and then go to Power options’ Advanced settings and disable wake timers.
• Disable the Send Feedback link (you can still access the tool from Control Panel).
• Make the taskbar not always on top (makes jump lists and group windows popups appear under other windows unfortunately).
• Slim down glass.  Go to Personalization, click on Window Color at the bottom, then Advanced appearance aettings.  Select Border Padding from the drop down and scale it down to 0 if you want super slim borders like in XP.  You can also click the title bar and size it down a few notches if you want.  Color settings may or may not take effect based on how apps use them (they’ll effect unthemed apps as well as the borders of 16-bit apps) but all size settings should.
• Ctrl+Shift+Right Click an empty spot on the start menu and click Exit Explorer to shut down explorer and save its settings without logging out (use Task Manager to start it up again, just make sure it’s not elevated if you’re using UAC).
• If you accidentally pinned the Computer or Network icons to the start menu you may find you can’t unpin them.  However you can reset the pinned list and regenerate it.  Exit Explorer using the option above and run regedit.  Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage and delete all entries starting with “Favorites”.  Then run Explorer and the list will be empty.  You can quickly refill it with program shortcuts you used to have by opening %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\StartMenu.  Then right click every item there and click Pin to Start Menu (pinned items are cached here, probably so the Distributed Link Tracking Client service can automatically fix moved programs’ shortcuts).
• You can make UAC less annoying by disabling the “dark background” if you find it results in annoying delays.  However note this is less secure so only do this if you don’t normally have malware problems anyway or otherwise know exactly what he consequences of this chance could be.  Open the Action Center and choose User Account Control settings.  Slide the bar down one notch to the second notch from the bottom and you’re in business.
• Fix Windows Installers that crash when run… if you have a third party MSI that crashes when run (such as UpdateStar‘s), try setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\CEIPEnable to 0 and run the installer again.  It might help.  This setting likely enables Customer Experience Improvement Program functionality in Windows Installer.  Disabling it should only stop install experience information from being sent to Microsoft.
• Make sure you’re using Windows Update to grab drivers, it’s a lot easier than installing them manually.
• If your games are running a bit sluggishly, try going into the game shortcut properties, Compatibility tab, and checking “Disable desktop composition”.  Glass can eat up considerable CPU and this option will disable it for as long as your game runs.  It may help.

Since the UI option was gone, the obvious solution is to find the registry entry that Explorer uses for that setting.  My search brought me here.  It’s a bit difficult to digest for the non-programmer so I’ll lay it out here.

There are a bunch of OS-specific intricacies, but fortunately it seems to not have changed since XP so we only need to be concerned about that variant.

The registry key we seek is at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects

The value is a binary value called Settings.  We are concerned with the 8th byte (double click to edit, it’s the first two numbers on the second line).

If you’re not sure about what you’re doing here, best to back up the registry key we’re changing so you can restore it.  Better yet, just forget about this hack, have someone who’s done this stuff before do it for you.

Back to the link I posted, there is a legend marked with “SINGLE OPTIONS” and “MULTIPLE OPTIONS”.  You should ignore it since it is far more complicated than it needs to be.  Our byte in Settings breaks down into bit flags:

• 0×1: Auto Hide Taskbar
• 0×2: Always on Top
• 0×4: Small icons in CLASSIC Start Menu (doesn’t apply to the small icon setting for the new menu).
• 0×8: Hide Clock
• 0×10 – 0×80: Who knows.  Reserved?  Always 0?  Probably best not to change these.

If you know what these mean, you have all the info you need to turn off Always on Top now (basically, turn off bit flag 0×2).  Just be sure to process kill and restart Explorer after you do it to force the setting to take effect (you may need to lock/unlock the taskbar to get the watermark to jump under the taskbar where it belongs now).

Next we have PathEnv (download), which is a similar tool but it allows you to manage your PATH environment string, which controls where Windows searches for apps when it can’t find the EXE name you typed.  It’s mostly useful for command prompt stuff.  You can reorder and add and remove folders from the list, as well as add user-specific folders that only apply to you.  Best part, the changes take effect immediately and will affect all new processes that run, no need to log off and back on.

Since these program both mess with system registry settings, even though I did a pretty thorough bug test I still recommend backing up the affected registry keys just in case (see the Projects page for the affected key names).]

I should probably upload AppCompactor soon since I found a nice icon in the Silk icon set for it, though the wizard banner and icon I made for it kinda suck so I dunno.

I also am working on another program, PortableTaskbar.  It functions just as the Taskbar and Start Menu do in Windows (Vista with some features taken from 7), but it’s completely portable.  Everything resides in two XML files on disk and it’s optimized for flash devices (icon loading for menus is done asyncronously).  This project arose out of my frustrations with menu programs which loaded icons syncronously.

I am quite proud of the feature set:

• Taskbar uses the same rules as Windows Explorer for showing windows, but only shows programs running off your portable device.  You can click and right click buttons and they  will react the same.
• Taskbar can be docked to any side of any screen.
• Start Menu is based off of Vista/7 design with in-pane progam browsing.
• Quick Launch feature on the taskbar.
• Frequently used programs keeps track of how many times you launch each app.
• Search feature can be used to quickly list a folder’s contents or to search the portable start menu.
• Can use USB Disk Ejector to immediately close PortableTaskbar and eject  the disk.
• Internet and E-mail links for your favorite portable apps.
• Places pane to allow you to browse your portable documents, music, videos… or whatever you want.  You can even put program links there, technically.  But folders are cooler cause they will expand into menus.
• Import and Export features for both PStart and ASuite XML databases.
• All paths entered into PortableTaskbar are converted into portable, relative paths.
• User Picture feature, like on the real Start Menu.
• Optimized for portable devices.  Loads icons asyncronously.  Only writes settings to disk on shutdown (or on request).

It’s feature-complete but I have some more ideas I might decide to implement first:

• Windows 7-like Quick Launch and taskbar
• Need to fix an invalid index exception thrown sometimes when I run a program.  Doesn’t seem to break anything when I continue.
• Might want to tweak some of the drag and drop stuff, there’s native drag and drop reordering I don’t use which I could enable (and which is probably nicer).
• Sometimes it’s hard to find the right place to right click to get an empty space on the places bar or programs menu (so you get the “Add” menu item option’).  Might add an “Insert new after” option to the item right click list.
• Figure out how to do visual style themeing.  The biggest problem is I don’t know how to draw the start icon or orb (help with that would be appreciated).  Might have to use P/Invoke to forcably extract the image resources from the theme DLL.
• Make a skinning engine and make a PortableApps.com theme.  It lends itself well to a taskbar (and there’s already a nice theme for the Start Menu in the PortableApps.com Menu app).